Some Portuguese Literature

While deciding what to read next, I settled during the interim to read Jose Saramago's Death With Interruptions. I'd read about this book in the New Yorker months ago, and it sounded interesting...then later, I'd read about the other of Portugal's two most well-known contemporary authors, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and thought I should find some stuff by him. Lobo Antunes always has an eye cast backwards to the historical time of Portuguese conquests in Africa, South America, and their foothold in India...one novel has Magellan showing up, five-hundred-years late, sailing into Lisbon towing the nation of Brazil behind his ship...

But here I'm reading Death With Interruptions. Saramago's concept is that death, specifically with the small "d", even though it's a person, has taken a vacation, and at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day no one dies. Horrific car accidents caused by alcoholic consumption end with mutilated bodies that refuse to turn into corpses. Elders on the cusp of death remain so indefinitely. At first this scenario, to the people living it, is like a utopian dream: we've conquered death. But, of course, the church is very upset (with no death there's no resurrection, with no resurrection there's no christianity) as well as the insurance industry and the undertaker industry. A black-market racket develops taking those on the cusp of death over the national lines, into one of the neighboring countries where death is still at work.

This is all very interesting, but sixty pages into the short book there are a two things that strike me. First, so far, there are no named characters at all, just titled voices like "the prime minister" and "the grandfather" of the poor country family we watch for a few pages. I don't think it's necessary to have characters to become emotionally involved with for a novel to work, but, I could be wrong, and I only say that characters may not be necessary because what I want to think can work for literature is that the obliteration of normal rules won't necessarily obliterate the art. I could be jumping to conclusions, but here it seems precarious, like the concept is the star, and we, as readers, should simply marvel in the quaint scenes that follow.

The second thing that struck me, something that leads this book to read more like a college student's transcript of a sci-fi movie treatment he's working on, is that the dialogue is not written in a conventional western way. As a reader, one gets used to seeing quotation marks breaking up dialogue, paragraph spacing being used, and the non-verbal action being housed outside of the quotes and commas. Here, Saramago crams entire conversations into super-duper run-on sentences, taking up entire pages sometimes, the actual spoken dialogue and non-verbal action all separated by commas, and capital letters being employed to signify that a voice has changed. So, on one hand, this looks like college-student summary, and on the other, it looks brilliant and poetic. Doing the dialogue this way lets him show characters and scenes that have emotion without needing the reader, or expecting the reader, to come away with any attachment to said characters. That's what really makes the concept the star.

I guess I did find something to read, not just for the interim.