The bell stops tolling

SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS — Art is the best weapon against death. Bach knew it, Michelangelo knew it, James Frey knows it (which is not to say that he isn't a cheater, or that he actually belongs in such illustrious company -- he's been included for his obvious joe-schmoe-ness), and Jose Saramago knows it. "Death With Interruptions" is his duomo, his Sistine Chapel, his allegoryparableliteraryphilosophysciencefictionnovelpaintingmusical composition.

In other words, one writer's petition against mortality.

"New Year, New Life" -- so read the headlines one terrible New Year's morning in a nameless country of 10 million inhabitants. The crisis? Eternal life. No one dies for an entire week. A country in the throes of suspended life, arrested death. An interdisciplinary commission is created: Newspaper editors, ministers, clairvoyants and cardinals are consulted. The insurance companies, as you can imagine, are in an uproar. The Catholic Church mourns the liberation of death. The people soon realize that, to liberate their loved ones, they must smuggle them out of the country under cover of darkness.

The government, in its infinite wisdom, tries to find death. Like Osama bin Laden, death eludes them. They assume death is a woman; a kind of bizarre profiling ensues -- is she dolichocephalic or brachycephalic? "The case of god is different," the author concedes. "However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes." Death, as so many writers have attested, is female, skeletal with large eye sockets and a scythe, often dressed in a sheet.

As a concession, death begins sending out letters in violet envelopes (Willy Wonka comes to mind) to give people who are going to die a week to organize their affairs.

Much to her surprise, one of the letters is returned to sender.

Up to this point in the novel (around halfway through), Saramago parades his status as author. In long sentences with questionable punctuation, he allows the voice of a runaway mind to narrate the story, intervening periodically until the reader feels both annoyed and powerless. You want to swat Saramago away, like a fly. Humanity seems ridiculous, with its fear of death and its desire for death. Just when you start to feel the author's artifice, his self-consciousness, the burden of so many years writing literary fiction, something unexpected happens. Saramago lets himself write a good old-fashioned love story.