Book Review: "Death at Intervals" by Jose Saramago

“Death at Intervals” is one of the many books I am re-reading by Saramago and I have been really enjoying my relaxation of my first re-reads of Saramago in a long while. Along with this I have re-read “Blindness” - my favourite of his, and “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” - both of these books are amazing but I have to say, I have not felt the same in a very long time to when I first read “Death at Intervals” some five or six years ago. Thankfully, it was like reading it for the first time, with fleeting similarities and familiarities in experience. The beginning, with all of its abruptness in media res, the style of the writing in all of its tragic passion and then we have the brilliance of this vagrant image which colours the book with the natural landscape, small villages and simple peoples. It is one of those things that I think is a real quality of Saramago and have enjoyed seeing it in his other great works. I have not read everything by Saramago, but from what I have read and re-read I can honest tell that he has a fascination in what happens when you take something very essential to human survival away. In “Blindness” Saramago takes away a man’s sight in a sudden act of apparent nothingness, changing the life of the man forever. But in this book we get something more extreme. In “Death at Intervals” we get the whole concept of death being taken away and when it is finally returned, it really is no longer the same. It begs the question about whether someone should know when they are going to die and exactly how much power our own expiration should have over us. I personally believe that there is no way to conquer it and we should settle with what we are dealt with unless avoidable.

The language of this book is amazing. In classic Saramago style, it throws you into the plot in the first few pages, it pushes you through an existential realisation and pulls you out by the existentialism with its convoluted ideas and passions that go on for pages at a time. One of the most beautiful writers of his century, this book is yet another example of his best work.

“The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, int he circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such phenomenon ever having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vespertine, without one death from an illness, a fatal fall, or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one. Not even from a car accident, so frequent on festive occasions when blithe irresponsibility and an excess of alcohol jockey for position on the roads to decide who will reach death first. New Year’s Eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities as if old Atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day.”

The folk vibe and the vagrant notions of this opening paragraph is definitely continuous throughout the book. It is like reading something from the mythical era being thrusted into the real world and apart from that itself, the book is pretty realistic. The notion that death had stopped for a day is, in the beginning, something to look forward to as people do not lose loved ones. But, as with any major change to human nature - it suffers dire consequences and so, when it returns, there is something very strange about the amount of control that death continuously initiates over the human world. When we talk about death in Saramago’s works, there is always something better than life about it, but in this book it seems like it is absolutely essential or, as the book presents to the reader - things will just start to go very, very bad indeed.