This week’s book was Death with Interruptions by José Saramago and it really got me thinking about the topic of death, thinking about mortality in a whole new way. The story describes what would happen if people simply stopped dying, something that seems like it would be celebrated at first. But Saramago shows how the absence of death would actually lead to a lot of problematic situations across society. Without deaths occurring, this whole system of monitoring life starts to break down rapidly. Hospitals are overrun, state benefits become unsustainable, and shady organizations even start transporting the undying elderly out of the country.

I think It’s an interesting perspective that necropolitics are the ones that get to control who lives and dies, to the point where it’s crucial to have sovereignty and administer the living. When death takes a break, the governing powers become threatened by this loss of control over mortality.

The second half of the book is where it got really interesting for me, when death itself becomes this bureaucratic figure, writing notifications to people to let them know their week has come. Weirdly, death’s prose style mirrors Saramago’s own rambling writing voice. It makes you think about how writing itself is almost an act of imposing boundaries and finality through sentence structure and punctuation An interesting twist is when Death itself is characterized as a human-like woman who falls in love. Yet for all the rules and paperwork death tries to establish, there’s one man who just refuses to die on the prescribed schedule. When Death encounters this cellist’s special musical performance, she ends up getting seduced by it. This made it seem like It’s almost as if art can achieve a form of resurrection that writing alone cannot. It made me rethink the role of death, is it simply a force of nature we should make peace with, rather than something to be feared?

From my perspective, I agree that death is what motivates us and gives life its special meaning. If we truly lived forever with no end in sight, there would be little desire for growth, creativity, or leaving a legacy. Permanent death, while it is saddening, reminds us to cherish our finite lives while we can and enjoy every little moment of it.

To me, the biggest takeaway from this novel is that death isn’t something to simply fear or cheat. Mortality turns out to be mixed into the very essence of how we live, work, create, and find meaning. Without that inevitability, human existence devolves into something meaningless and unsustainable.

Discussion Question:

What is your take on the personification of death? Does it make the novel more confusing or does it help with the understanding.