BackCountry of the immortal
Country of the immortal
PremiumDeath at Intervals:Harvill Secker,196 pages, Rs599.
The Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate Jose Saramago is now 85 but, as with Philip Roth, old age seems to have had the effect not of enervating but of further animating him, of rousing him into a late flowering. Death at Intervals, his new novel, is the fourth to appear in English translation in the last decade, and it is as good as anything he has ever written.
In Death at Intervals, the residents of a country are agitated by the discovery that, starting New Year’s Day, death has disappeared entirely from their land. Accidents kill no one, illness takes no toll, and even those about to breathe their last seem eternally suspended on the verge. At first, there is great excitement and rejoicing because from the beginning of time, human beings have dreamt of immortality, but this mood swiftly collapses when the problems of demography, livelihood, economics and family life become apparent. It soon becomes clear that, as the prime minister of the country remarks, “If we don’t start dying again, we have no future."
Here, in the final chapters of the book, in the fascinating picture of an ordinary man whose mundane life is watched with rapt interest by an entity who can eliminate him with one stroke, Saramago’s novel rushes down from the Olympian perspective of its initial premise and begins to speak in a startlingly intimate, tender and wistful key.
The reader finds himself, surprisingly, sympathizing with death—who has never lived and will never know what it is to live, and who is as burdened as any of us. Saramago’s immensely acute metaphysical intelligence, his sly jokes and his gnarled and knotty sentences all come together to make for a death-haunted book that reveals its author to be fiercely, joyfully alive.
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