Jose Saramago: Death Interrupted (Extended Version)

An interview with the late Nobel laureate

Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Thursday, Jul 29 2010

In September of 2008, on assignment for this newspaper, I traveled to the Canary Islands to interview the man whom, until June 18 of this year, I regarded as the world’s greatest living writer: José Saramago. For nearly two years, I had been courting the Portuguese Nobel laureate through his American publisher and British publicist before finally winning his consent, just prior to the U.S. publication of Death With Interruptions, a magnificently wry fable about the unforeseen complications that arise when the Grim Reaper treats herself to an extended holiday (and ends up falling in love with a cello player).

ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE T. WEBSTER

Jose Saramago

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It was, one might suggest, an unsurprising subject for a writer who, then 85, had recently survived a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. Except that death and Saramago were bedfellows as far back as his second novel, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, written when he was nearly 60. Death, too, is everywhere in Blindness, the 1995 international bestseller in which an unexplained epidemic of sightlessness reduces the human race to a primitive, animalistic state; and in his masterpiece, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which observes the final months in the life of an exiled doctor returning to his native Lisbon. Among other things, that book anticipates Saramago’s own life of exile in the Canaries, where the devout atheist lived for the two decades following efforts by the Portuguese government to censor his controversial 1991 novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

Yet if Saramago sensed he was on borrowed time, it stirred in him not despair but rather an extraordinary prolificacy. When we met in 2008, he had just published a new novel, The Elephant’s Journey (now available in English translation) and, most unexpectedly, launched a daily blog of political and literary musing, which have been collected in the recently published anthology, The Notebook (take that, Nicholas Sparks!). He had also begun work on another novel, Cain, which was published in the fall of 2009, shortly after the author announced on his blog that he was taking an extended hiatus to devote himself fully to yet another new novel.

A private audience with Saramago was a rare opportunity, not to be taken lightly. Yet, despite my repeated requests to his agents for a seasoned Portuguese-English translator, I arrived at the author’s stately private library, high on a winding Lanzarote road, to discover that our interpreter would be a well-intentioned young man on Saramago’s staff, who spoke not a word of Portuguese (requiring Saramago to speak in Spanish) and only limited English. To state the obvious, this led to an awkward session during which I could tell that some of my questions were being mistranslated to the author, while no more than half of Saramago’s long, considered replies were coming back to me in comprehensible English. Somehow, we muddled through, and upon returning to the U.S., I handed off the recording of the interview to another translator (the invaluable David Barba), in the hope that he might make some sense of it. By the time I had the results in hand, Death With Interruptions was already in bookstores and — writerly neuroses having gotten the better of me — I had come to regard my time with Saramago as a giant missed opportunity.

Like the patient who hopes to forestall illness by not returning his doctor’s phone calls, I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at that transcript until the news arrived a few weeks ago that Saramago was dead at 87. At that point, I retrieved my proof copy of Death With Interruptions from the bookshelf — my invoice from the Hotel Los Fariones still pressed between its pages — and excavated the interview from the darkest recesses of my laptop. To my happy surprise, I discovered that while the language barrier was undeniably present that day in Lanzarote (as annotated by David Barba when he was putting the pieces back together), the majority of our dialogue was more lucid than I recalled. Moreover, much of what Saramago had to say — about his work, the failings of Capitalism and, above all, about death — was as bracing as if he had said it only yesterday.

Saramago talked the way he wrote, with the certainty of an enlightened man — one who has rejected dogma in favor of contemplating, in his own inimitable terms, the state of the world and man’s place in the cosmos. In the remarkable final passages of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the protagonist accompanies the ghost of another great Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, on his journey to a place “where the sea ends and the earth awaits.” Now Saramago has joined them in that abyss, leaving behind a shelf of literature that is nothing if not immortal.

L.A. WEEKLY: Death is present in many of your books.
JOSE SARAMAGO: Death is present every day in our lives. It’s not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

Specifically, inManual of Painting and Calligraphy, the painter H. tells us that he’s been obsessed with death since he was a teenager.
In Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, there is a passage where the narrator specifically says that he had his father’s skull in his hands. That was me. My father fought in World War I. In Lisbon, there is a section in the cemetery, in all cemeteries, intended for the remains of soldiers who fought in World War I. My father’s remains were put in a small box and put away. They are in Lisbon right now. I can’t say where they are exactly, but at that moment, I remember I picked up a skull as Hamlet did with Yorick’s skull. This is not a philosophical reflection, it was simply my father.

I suppose this is a long-winded way of getting to the question: why now make Death the main character in a novel? How did you come to this decision? After the presence of Death being in many of your novels, now she is the star, so to speak.
Well, that’s the joke, because none of us likes the idea of dying. But the truth is that we all have to die. To continue living, we have to die. That’s the story of humanity — generation after generation — that we are going to die. There’s nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one’s life. In the world, in a planet that has six billion inhabitants, it’s just one moment and it’s over. What is truly strange is that death should be something sinister or grim; disturbing at least. My novel looks at the humor in that, the irony of it.