Hello everyone. Welcome back to this week’s book. This week we delved into José Saramago’s Death With Interruptions. The impression I had of this book before I read it completely changed after I finished reading the book. The outlook death had in this book was completely different from all the other books we have read this semester. There was a point in the book where I was like “Why am I reading a book full of death?”, however to be honest, it was not that bad. It did make me think about death in a whole other way.
The book was about what would happen if people stopped dying. Now while this would make everyone happy at first, it would certainly come with a lot of problems. The entire life system would quickly stop working efficiently. Something that I had mixed feelings about was the fact that the necropolitics were the ones who decided who lived and who died. It represents that the people with power will be the ones who decide other people’s faiths.
The second half of the book is what made me change my mind about it. The storyline is so interesting, wherein the people start getting letters informing them that their week has arrived. Another thing that I really liked was that Death was then written as a character, a woman, who falls in love. However I quickly realized that she was just like us, a normal person. She just wanted to be appreciated, and that is why she stopped death.
The writing style was something that I really didn’t like. The sentences were too long, which made it difficult for me to concentrate on what it actually meant. His limited punctuation was not very easy to keep up with, especially quotation marks, and him directly incorporating dialogues into the text. I think he wanted to blur the lines between speech and narration, which did happen, but it also confused me to no end.
This definitely made me think about death, but in a different way. Fear is something most people fear when they hear about death, however reading this book made me appreciate it. This was mainly because death makes us value and respect our life even more. We stop taking it for granted, and we start living more. This book made me realize that if death didn’t occur, then people would stop appreciating the small things.
See you all in the next and final book!
Discussion Question: Did this book change your perspective on death, or did you feel the same all the way?
Week 1 - Introductory Blog Post 
One response to “Death With Interruptions”
“This book made me realize that if death didn’t happen, people would stop appreciating the little things.” Also, for my part, made me realize that immortality can also be scary. We associate human Life (in capital letters) with a series of attributes such as youth and health, for example. And what happens when expectations are not met? The novel (and fiction in general) is a mental experiment that, as you say, makes us value what seems already established.
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