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But the mention of Fernando Pessoa, the odd and wonderful poet whose work before his untimely death in 1935 has become the centerpiece of modern Portuguese literature, reminds me that, in describing the second half of José Saramago's latest book, we also haven't said quite enough about José Saramago himself—for he is a very Portuguese writer: lusophone and lusocentric, to borrow, pretentiously, from Lusitania, the old Latin name for the province of Portugal. Born in 1922, to parents named de Sousa in a village a hundred miles north of Lisbon, he reportedly picked up the last name Saramago (which means "wild radish") through a mistake on his birth certificate. A Communist newspaper editor for much of his career, he found international recognition only at age 55, with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda, his 1987 love story centered around the building of the Convent of Mafra, Portugal's largest and most famous Baroque building. Baltasar and Blimunda was not, by any means, a bad story—primarily because the easy moralism of his anti-moralism was far more repressed than in, say, his self-satisfied 1991 paean to atheism, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
For that matter, his new book, Death with Interruptions, is also not, by any means, a bad story. In the second half of the book—and, yes, let us arrive, at last, at the point I've been trying to reach for some while now: a discussion of the second half of José Saramago's latest tale, although Saramago himself constantly employs this over-cute device of punting, further and further down the page, the plot element that he promises, over and over, to reveal. It is—along with his trademark refusal to use quotation marks and his idiosyncratic notions about capitalization—the most annoying feature of his otherwise surprisingly enjoyable prose.
But arrive at the point, eventually he does, and in the second half of Death with Interruptions, José Saramago writes a competent and unimportant little fabulism about death as a woman who falls in love with a 49-year-old cellist in a Portuguese symphony orchestra. In the first half of Death with Interruptions, Saramago writes a more significant but also more incompetent fabulism about death as a woman who, one New Year's Day, decides to experiment by allowing no one to die in the nation of Portugal.
And the combination of these two halves makes for a disaster of a book—a fun, pleasant, easy-to-read disaster, admittedly, but the world is full of fun, pleasant, easy-to-read fantastical tales. Try the 19th-century American Frank R. Stockton, if that's the kind of writing you want to indulge. Does anyone still read Stockton? He worked for years with Mary Mapes Dodge as an editor on Saint Nicholas Magazine, that exemplar of middle-class late-Victorian children's taste, and he wrote a first-rate gentle humoresque in 1897 called Rudder Grange, about housekeeping on a houseboat. But he was, in his day, best known for his small fantasies: "The Griffin and the Minor Canon," for instance, and "The Bee-Man of Orn," and especially "The Lady, or the Tiger?"
The point here is not that Frank R. Stockton is a better writer than José Saramago; it is merely that, if this sort of stuff is to your taste, "The Lady, or the Tiger?" will seem no worse than either half of Death with Interruptions, and yet no one ever thought of nominating Stockton for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was too conventional—but, then, so is Saramago, although the conventions have much changed. Stockton was too ready to employ the easy tropes of fabulous literature—but then, Saramago does the same. The problem, really, is that Frank R. Stockton's works were just too insubstantial to take very seriously—and what does that leave us to say about the Nobel Prize-winning José Saramago and his latest book, Death with Interruptions?
Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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