Death with Interruptions and Twilight

I'm doing a bit of a mash-up this time because, really, Jose Saramago's book, Death with Interruptions, was something of a tidy segue into Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire romance novel Twilight.

Saramago, a Nobel prize-winning novelist, seems to write books with as few paragraph breaks as possible, little capitalization (unless it's to further confuse the reader), and no dialogue indicators. I had already abandoned his novel Blindness because of this style, but I was really intrigued by the premise of Death with Interruptions. On the first day of the year, at the stroke of midnight, in an unnamed country, people simply stop dying. Unfortunately, good health does not necessarily follow immortality and instead there continue to be people on the very brink of death--some horribly mangled, some merely comatose, and most somewhere in-between. They simply fail to progress to the next logical step in human existence.

The book is split into two parts. In the first, the populace and the government, as well as the institutions that had hitherto been involved with the "commerce" of death deal with both the promise and the threat of immortality. As Saramago writes, they are "a society torn between the hope of living forever and the fear of never dying." I liked that the down-sides of immortality were addressed. People don't want to be perpetually dying without actually succeeding at it, so they start smuggling themselves or their relatives over the border where death continues to ply its trade. Professional smugglers make a fortune and funeral homes and insurance companies adapt in their own creative ways to the drying up of business. The goverment and the old folks homes seem under the most threat from future overburden and the book bogs down a bit on details.

In the second section of Death with Interruptions, death (with an assertive lower-case d) gets creative, and tries to remedy her mistake of offering immortality by promising to send letters ahead of time so you get a heads up about the date (although not the exact circs.) of your demise. This was kind of funny, I thought, as I pictured newly-powerful Posties (because, of course, she used the Postal Service) chasing unwilling recipients through the streets, brandishing the violet-colored letter that no one can refuse.

Ah, except that one letter is refused. This was the most confusing part of the book, though I think I was kind of giving up by the time I got this far. It's incredibly exhausting to sort through unmarked dialogue, besides which, Saramago never met minutiae he didn't want to dissect. In any case, one of the letters is never delivered and death sets off on a quest to discover why. I never did quite figure out why, except that there are hints that the target was already immortal for some reason.

Which brings us to Twilight where immortality is seen as romantic with none of the awkward what-will-we-do-with-old-people business from Saramago. Vampires mythology reassuringly assures eternal youth (well, depending how old you are when you cross over) as well as eternal life. Um, except that should really be eternal death.

I didn't have a problem with the mythology in this book. Sure, vampires are sexy, don't actually turn to a pile of ashes in sunlight (instead they glow--kind of cool), are incredibly fast and strong, great drivers...etc. Apparently they're attracted by smell (not blood) the way some people prefer chocolate ice cream to strawberry (one of the strangest analogies made in this book). I'm okay with all that, and, as promised by friends Alyssa and Denise (not teens, mind you), Twilight rips right along. A seventeen year old of Adonis perfection as both boyfriend and saviour, a human in peril from rival scary vampires, hints of a werewolf clan--All great.What I hated was the writing, and the thought that all this could unfold around THE PROM. Okay, I know it's a teen book so I'm not too harsh on this, but there's no excuse for lazy dialogue. Please, make me believe kids are talking. Vampire dialogue, I'll give more of a pass on because some of them are over 300 years old in this book. They can have strange turns of phrases if they want.

I thought the scenes of Edward and Bella trying to hold themselves back (too much intimacy could cause Edward to literally rip off Bella's head. Ooo! Awkward!) worked really well in a Jane Austen kind of way, while also echoing the X-Men character Rogue who can never touch anyone without killing him. The enforced chastity for Rogue is just depressing, but in the case of Bella and Edward, it's incredibly romantic. Yep, I get it.

Still, I guess Bella is a seventeen year old, smitten by her first boyfriend, who happens to be a vampire, and she sees nothing wrong with wanting to become immortal to ensure a "life" with him. Yikes! really? Barring that in her future, I see a sad little echo of Eos asking Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life, but forgetting to ask for eternal youth, thereby cursing her handsome lover to eventual crickethood. That's a myth that always freaked me out as a kid.

I'm probably not going to read the rest of the books in the Twilight series, but I kind of like the idea of a 38 year old Bella still trying to hang onto her 17 year old vampire boytoy (who has only just succeeded in kissing her without killing her).

I'm also done with Saramago (ow! my brain hurts), but I'll probably watch the Twilight movie as well as Blindness (a nod to Saramago). The dialogue will probably be worse or just as bad in Twilight, but in Blindness at least I'll know who's talking.