Death with Interruptions

José Saramago

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008 - Fiction - 238 pages

On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration--flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home--families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots.
Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small "d, " became human and were to fall in love?

Contents

• Section 1: 1
• Section 2: 14
• Section 3: 28
• Section 4: 41
• Section 5: 59
• Section 6: 74
• Section 7: 94
• Section 8: 117
• Section 9: 135
• Section 10: 149
• Section 11: 161
• Section 12: 173
• Section 13: 186
• Section 14: 202
• Section 15: 217

About the author

José Saramago was born on November 16, 1922. He spent most of his childhood on his parent's farm, except while attending school in Lisbon. Before devoting himself exclusively to writing novels in 1976, he worked as a draftsman, a publisher's reader, an editor, translator, and political commentator for Diario de Lisboa. He is indisputably Portugal's best-known literary figure and his books have been translated into more than 25 languages. Although he wrote his first novel in 1947, he waited some 35 years before winning critical acclaim for work such as the Memorial do Convento. His works include The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, Baltasar and Blimunda, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and Blindness. At age 75, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 for his work in which "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, continually enables us to apprehend an elusory reality." He died from a prolonged illness that caused multiple organ failure on June 18, 2010 at the age of 87.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Death with Interruptions
• Author: José Saramago
• Translated by: Margaret Jull Costa
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008
• ISBN: 0151012741, 9780151012749
• Length: 238 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary