MikePadgett.com

Death at Intervals

— Saramago is the sort of funny old man I would've loved to have read bedtime stories to me when I was a kid.”

• José Saramago
• Harvill Secker (2008)
• 
• Author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998

As translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Saramago is the sort of wise old gent we’d want present if we could still demand bedtime stories in adulthood. Death at Intervals has all of the charm, quietly controlled meanderings and simple sagacity of a writer who’s plainly enjoying his literary prime.

Based on a “what-if”, the sort of open question of which screenwriters are fond, this is another of Saramago’s metaphysical fables in which Death decides to take a break, such that the order of human society starts to collapse. And Death is female, a fact of which Saramago convinces us in his typically laborious, yet always affable, style.

Just as in The Double, the writer delights once more in telling the tale of an illogical cause and its logical effects. For, in Saramago’s world, a doppelgänger will fancy your wife, the Devil is quite pleasant and a whole population will spontaneously choose not to vote.