Over the past couple of weeks MQUP has been presenting Stan Persky's recommendations from Reading the 21st Century.
The first decade of the twenty-first century was noteworthy for war, terror, religious revival, economic collapse, and a technological revolution that prompted countless critical responses and gave rise to a paradox: writing flourished, but reading declined. Reading the 21st Century investigates the urgent themes, major works, and crisis of reading in an era of instant communication.
For our third installment, Persky reviews Death with Interruptions by José Saramago.
In Saramago’s mordantly comic Death with Interruptions, on New Year’s Eve, people in an unnamed landlocked country of 10 million inhabitants, one equipped with the usual institutional accoutrements of modern society, suddenly stop dying. Though some may object to the immaturity of Saramago’s leftist politics, his political satire on church, government, media, “maphia,” and various branches of the funeral industry (now reduced to burying cats and dogs) will strike most readers as “deadly” accurate in this depiction of the effects of temporary immortality.
From the outset, the pace is simultaneously brisk but leisurely, and the tone is mock-dry:
The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon ever having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vespertine, without one death from an illness, a fatal fall, or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one. Not even from a car accident, so frequent on festive occasions, when blithe irresponsibility and an excess of alcohol jockey for position on the roads to decide who will reach death first.
At first ordinary people are thrilled, at last in possession of “humanity’s greatest dream since the beginning of time.” But cooler, more calculating minds, those of authority, soon prevail. All the major institutions of power quickly come to view the end of death as a calamity. If people live forever, what will happen to the pension system? Funeral homes and life insurance companies will be driven out of business. The initial good news threatens to turn into a social catastrophe. “If we don’t start dying again, we have no future,” the prime minister tells the king.
All of this is delivered with Saramago’s trademark eccentric punctuation. His tales are constructed in long run-on sentences marked only by commas, in which the characters’ thoughts and dialogue, as well as the observations of the narrator, are undifferentiated. And who is the presiding narrative personality of this and other fictions? Saramago adopts the wry tone of the Portuguese peasant he was as a youth.
Then, halfway through, after we’ve pretty much got the absurdist picture, and just as death has suspended the “moratorium” on death as a botched experiment, there’s a surprising turn in the tale. The surprise is for the title character, that shrouded rack of bones with only a scythe for companionship, who nonetheless has the shapeshifting power to become a corporeal being, say, an attractive young woman in her 30s. In the course of her professional duties, death runs into a cellist. Not a great cellist like Rostropovich, perhaps, but one good enough to perform the occasional solo when it’s called for by the symphony orchestra that employs him. He’s a rather lonely cellist of 50, with a dog, whose amusements are as modest as walks in the park, and whose evening repast is as humble as cellophane wrapped sandwiches. Something about this cellist, not to put too fine a pun on it, strikes a chord in death.
What makes this late work of Saramago’s not only thoroughly enjoyable but in fact joyous, at least to my mind (other critics accorded it those dreaded “mixed reviews”), is that its creator allows us to momentarily imagine an eternal version of the only paradise worth having, life itself. For a stretch of just under two hundred pages we are permitted to doff the unbearable weightiness of being that is contained in the perpetual reminder of mortality. All the while, of course, we continue to know what’s in store for us, though as Saramago said in a late interview, “The worst that death has is that you were here, and now you’re not.”
To learn more about Reading the 21st Century, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
Over the next few weeks MQUP will be presenting Stan Persky's recommendations from Reading the 21st Century.
The first decade of the twenty-first century was noteworthy for war, terror, religious revival, economic collapse, and a technological revolution that prompted countless critical responses and gave rise to a paradox: writing flourished, but reading declined. Reading the 21st Century investigates the urgent themes, major works, and crisis of reading in an era of instant communication.
For our second installement, Persky reviews Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by former U.S. counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke.
If there is any doubt about this preoccupation, the most dramatic anecdote in Clarke’s book (which he also related on 60 Minutes) was his encounter with Bush on the evening of Sept. 12. “He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. ‘Look,’ he told us … ‘See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way …’ I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. ‘But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this.’” Bush, however, was not to be put off, and insisted on checking the Saddam connection. Clarke replied: “‘Absolutely, we will look … again … But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al-Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iraq plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.’ ‘Look into Iraq, Saddam,’ the President said testily and left us.”
The exchange is worth repeating not only for its glimpse into the Bush administration’s thinking but also because it had an immediate role in the extraordinary counterattack on Clarke that the White House launched in the wake of Clarke’s shocking revelations. The first hint came the night of Clarke’s appearance on 60 Minutes. Since it’s standard practice for such programs to provide a semblance of “balance” by allowing for rebuttals to sensational accusations, 60 Minutes looked for a White House respondent to Clarke’s allegations. The best it could scare up on short notice was one of Condaleezza Rice’s minions. Confronted by the story of Bush’s order to Clarke to find an Iraq connection, Rice’s staffer told 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl, “We have no record of that conversation in the White House.” The implication was unsubtlely obvious: maybe Mr. Clarke is lying.
The veteran reporter cast a very cold eye on the messenger, and said words to the effect of, “Young man, perhaps you’ve never heard of 60 Minutes, but we have a substantial budget to do fact-checking, and we have two sources to substantiate Mr Clarke’s story of his conversation with the president and one of them is an eyewitness.” The sub-text of her thrust was: Do you think we’re so dumb as to let Clarke make a sensational claim like that without checking it? There was a nanosecond of silence in the perpetual white noise of television as the camera watched Rice’s subordinate swallow his tongue before his brain clicked onto the inner mechanism that produces the requisite bureaucratic babble. The next day the White House allowed that perhaps such a conversation had taken place. The day after that, it was conceded that the president had asked Clarke to check for an Iraq connection in the interest of canvassing all options.
The connection (or absence of one) between Iraq and 9/11 mattered for two reasons. First, the suggestion that there was a link between the two was one of several pretexts, all of them false as it turned out, concocted by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, the administration succeeded at one point in getting more than half the American public, according to polls, to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the terrorist attacks on America. As long as we’re looking at manufactured gullibility, it should also be noted that more than half the international Muslim population, according to polls, came to believe that the 9/11 attacks were a Jewish plot, which tells us that inculcating ignorance is not limited by national boundaries or cultures.
From the moment I first saw and heard Clarke on 60 Minutes, I had the sense that this was a smoking gun. In all of his subsequent appearances, Clarke was credible, consistent, unflappable. We had become accustomed to getting a lot of “spin” and not much substance from public rhetoric. This was unnervingly different. There might be some argument with the interpretation, but the facts weren’t in dispute. For people who had seen the Watergate hearings in the 1970s, or the Iran-Contra scandal hearings in the mid-80s, Clarke’s story, told over several days, in a variety of oral and printed forms, had much the same weight.
To learn more about Reading the 21st Century, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the authors, contact MQUP Publicist
Jacqui Davis.
Reading the 21st Century: Part 1
Reading the 21st Century: Part 2
Reading the 21st Century: Part 4
