Death is a cliché. Every time someone mentions death in some artistic way or says that this book, that deals with death or this picture here really depicts death, or that television show is about death as if it is human in a comedic sense – it all is just cliché. The subject of death, in any way be it philosophical, artistic, reality or just as a plot device is just something that to me is cliché, and boring. Admittedly death will be part of all works in some way or another – a characters parent has recently died, or there are brief mentions of a character or a relationship of sorts to a character that has passed away. Death is just the shadow on the outskirts of the story. The ghastly morbid pictures that can be seen everywhere though. As if in someone or another, society itself and the human individual itself is obsessed with the our own ambiguous mortal fate. Some people embrace it – with skull and crossbones tattooed on their arms; others use it as a gimmick or some marketing scheme to attract a certain kind of group of people, who think they are edgy because they are all into the concept of death or that they are really deep because they think about death often. If anything death is just a concept and marketing ploy that has been exaggerated and blown far from the extreme that it no longer has any real function besides its intended natural purpose in society. The idea of philosophising about death, or talking about death, writing about it, and using it in some comedic sense, has all been done before, and is not something that particularly interests me because of the fact that it almost feels like it has all be done before. There is no denying that death is part of the human experience. There is no doubt that death is part of every human culture that has existed throughout the time line of human history. From Hades the god of the Greek underworld and his Roman counterpart Pluto, to the ancient Egyptian god Osiris who was killed and cut up by his brother Set – not to mention the Jackal headed god Anubis; in Japan (Shinto) Izanami is the goddess of both creation and death; in contemporary society Santa Muerte or Holy Death (Saint Death) is a rising cult figure in Mexico, to even Christian beliefs with the concept of the angel of death Uriel and the misunderstanding or the theory that Satan itself is the angel of death. In the end the human experience is surrounded by the mysterious and ambiguous concept of death, however the concept itself has been explored far too much.
Even to this day it is still being explored and talked about, in fiction and in works. One just has to look around and see it plastered all over. Young adult fiction at the moment has found its niche with this trend, from undead love interest between the living and the dead, or being haunted by a loved one or a love that transcends life itself; or for young adult men it is about the perseverance of the human spirit to survive against the odds. If one requires examples, one can say J.K. Rowling’s novels (her “Harry Potter,” Series) really focus on death – it’s about the idea of trying to conquer death itself. This new up and coming film series “The Hunger Games,” focuses on death in a dystopian world but also focuses on politics – but right now it looks to be about the survival against the odds – it is also very popular piece of work, being a continual seller over the Christmas season. Yet it’s trite, trivial and has been over done before.
Realizing I needed a book, because I myself was running out of books to read, and just looking for some to read that was cheap, and may have been somewhat interesting. While hunting around, I couldn’t find anything of real interest and decided to play it safe, and grabbed another book by the Nobel Prize winning author in nineteen-ninety eight Jose Saramago and his novel “Death with Interruptions,” or if you are in the United Kingdom it is “Death with Intervals.” With the above being said, I thought to myself this sounds really cliché and that I am not going to enjoy this, but I needed something to read, and needed something to review for the blog and I went off and bought it anyway. However I was surprised as well, while reading this book.
It certainly feels like my vocabulary has increased, immensely. Which at times became a condescending plenteous and patronizing annoyance to me, that I didn’t know what some of these words meant. Which brought me back to do the days of being young when I used words that seemed so adult to me and foreign and grown up to me; I used these words everyday sentences, and the looks that were given to me, as laughable humored condescending smiles often discouraged me and made me angry. Reading some of these words, here and the exposure of my ignorance to some words still, however it was more of a vocabulary lesson more than anything else.
Jose Saramago’s novels, read more like an oral folk tale. As if someone is reading the transcript of some conversations between random people that just happen to make up the story or the novel; or another way to look at it, is that Jose Saramago really quite literarily takes the concept of the third person narration, as being a fly on the wall and then suspends character development and psychological insight in favour or observation of the characters or rather just listening to the characters. While this worked rather well for his novel “Blindess,” because the characters themselves were blind and therefore names, even characterization was put on hold because of the lack of site, however when it came to this novel personally it felt more like a sense of laziness or a lack of really wanting to put the effort into psychological in-depth and characterization, instead favouring sociological insights and political criticism and one’s own views on the state and affairs of political messes. Though there are many memorable quotations and memorable discussions of the philosophy of death, and there is plenty of food for thought – a whole buffet worth really; it felt more like a discussion or a transcript for the first bit, and was becoming more of a tedious read than anything else. However one of my favourite lines is the following:
“We will continue to philosophize since that is what we were born to do, even if all we have to philosophize about is the void, What for, I don’t know what for, All right, then, why, Because philosophy needs death as much as religions do, if we philosophize it’s in order to know that we will die, as monsieur de Montaigne said, to philosophize is to learn to learn how to die.”
This is how the entire books is written. These run on sentences, and long winded sentences would make even the sentences of Virginia Woolf appear normal. If one looks carefully at the quotation above, certain words are capitalized at the ending of a coma (,) and others are not. The capitalized words are, the beginning of a new characters speech. This can become quite tiresome after all the re-reading to see who is talking when and where. The constant political and moral and philosophical conversations, appear less and less like a political allegory after a while, as the book was first intended to be (or what the back of the book said it was going to be) and instead comes off or across as the author himself have a discussion with himself, about the nature of death, morality and political and moral issues. As a reader it certainly felt like, I was being alienated and that I just happen to be standing in a large group of people chatting about the same discussion while completely ignoring me as a reader.
However half way through the novel, its tedious and tiresome reading starts to take a different view and outlook. What at first becomes a crisis of control or a crisis of religious proportions of how do we get believers to believe in what we say there is to believe in, if the greatest fear of all is taken away? How can there be hope without fear? When it starts to shift away from the macro point of view of this unnamed country plagued by the inability to die, and people ageing and getting hurt, and still getting sick and yet still unable to die – and started to focus on a smaller stage, or a more personal stage then it gets interesting.
‘death’ with a small “D,” becomes a human character itself. She feels for a cellist who she cannot bring herself to kill. With a moving towards a smaller cast of characters, it starts to get a little more interesting. But after a while, again Jose Saramago falls into clichés. In the end it felt like I was just reading another variation of the Orpheus myth, and when Jose Saramago tried to tie the two story lines together it felt weak. The protagonist ‘death,’ felt one dimensional and I think that personally Jose Saramago focused too much on larger idea’s or the larger picture that he never allowed his characters development and again came off as more of a fictional discussion of his political idea’s and his views and thoughts rather than anything that was new or intriguing to me as a reader. In the end by far “Blindess,” was a better book.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
