In may, the fifth International Symposium of the Definition of Death Network will convene in Varadero, Cuba. This unlikely event is not a surreptitious beach holiday for the members of a satanic cult, but a serious academic conference at which doctors and lawyers will discuss an increasingly troubled medical definition of “death”.
With technological advances such as life-support smudging the boundary between this life and the next, we seem to edge ever closer to cheating our oldest adversary. And what if we managed it? Or, as Jos? Saramago more playfully formulates it, what if death went on strike?
To take a single, absurd premise such as this and then ruminate at length on its implications is trademark Saramago, and with characteristic dry wit he proceeds to debunk the rosy romance of eternal life. With death off duty, undertakers face bankruptcy, hospitals are overwhelmed, and people yearn for ways of cheating death doubly: not to live, but to die. The dream of eternal life becomes a living nightmare.
The idea yields a hundred or so pages of material, but there are only so many times you can riff on a single theme. So Saramago brings death back - as an animate being, a female grim-reaper - and off he goes again with this second notion, lucubrating on the intriguing possibilities of a conscious, corporeal death.
This halfway shift from the panoramic to the private is sudden, even awkward, but it’s typical of a narrator who is at constant pains to be conspicuous. This, and the cartoonish nature of a shapeshifting death who posts violet letters to her victims, lend the book the air of a puppet show, where the strings are ever visible, and it’s the narrator who warrants closest attention. Perhaps Saramago had that very analogy in mind when he chose a cellist as the person who defeats death later in the book - someone who, like him, manipulates the strings.
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Like the bones of its morbid protagonist, the anecdotes and potted details of the story hang together only loosely, but we don’t watch the puppet show for the coherence of the puppets, we watch it for the parables of the puppet master. We don’t read this for the measured momentum of a conventional narrative; we read for the offbeat, eccentric imagination and wry social commentary of the 85-year-old Portuguese Nobel laureate.
Death at Intervals, by Jos? Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa,
Harvill Secker, £12.99