Wow, we are almost at the end of all of the readings as I am sitting here at my desk writing a blog post on my second to last novel of the semester.
For this week’s reading, I chose to read “Death With Interruptions’ by José Sarmago. I chose this book for no particular reason other than the title and front cover which I would advise may not be the ideal way to choose a novel. This method of choosing a novel is unusual for me as I normally like to gain a little bit of insight or background on the book I am reading as I am not a fan of surprises. However, for this novel, I went into it not knowing anything about it or what it is about. Hence, once I looked at the PDF of the novel, the back of the novel was displayed so I started with that. The first sentence I read was “On the first day of the new year, no one dies”. I stopped at this point and thought “Wait this is giving Purge but the opposite”. As many of us may know, The Purge is a movie based on a 12-hour period in which all crimes are legal, even murder. This one line gave me the vibe and anxious feeling of the purge siren and the announcement made for the time period to begin. Then I thought maybe this was a weird and intrusive connection and continued reading.
As I started reading the novel I quickly realized I was in for an interesting ride as this was quite a philosophical book in certain senses and actually not about the purge. The book discusses the concept of death from different perspectives such as relaying it to religion, careers, and society in general. The book discusses the concept of not having death as well as its implications (i.e. What would happen to those who work closely with death?). There were a lot of “what if” questions that the book presented which fit its speculative fiction genre. It had me thinking about new perspectives as I have never thought about what would happen to religious institutions like churches if there was no death. Moreover, we are so accustomed to thinking about the world in normal practice that when ideas like the ones in the novel are brought to our attention it has us in a loophole. With that being said, this is a good read for people who are open to skepticism and deep thoughts about the world.
Discussion Question:
What institution or job (i.e., health care system, funeral institutions, etc) would be the most affected if there was no death in our world?
I think the funeral institutions would be the most affected, mainly because they would almost run out of business, considering no one is really dying.
I definitely think funeral institutions would be affected the most, many workers in that field would lose their jobs since no one is dying. However, since there aren’t any deaths, there is an increase in elderly people going into elderly homes; therefore, they’d need more workers. So, in an ideal situation, people working in funeral institutions could work in elderly homes to take care of them instead.
Along with funeral institutions, I think the entire health care department would suffer the most as they would have so many patients who would not get better but also not die, so they would have to keep on providing extra care for them.
I didn’t even realize this is our second to last book!I think the healthcare department would suffer greatly, there would have to be a change of rules of what is consider a health emergency.