Death With Interruptions-Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago is a Nobel Prize winning author, so I was kind of intimidated when I first started reading his book. Stylistically, he is very unique. He doesn't use quotation marks or paragraphs when writing dialogue, so conversations between characters flow together in a very interesting way. It can be a kind of difficult read for that very same reason, plus the fact that his syntax is very sarcastic but at the same time, heavy-laden with tons of difficult vocabulary words (for a seventeen year old reader, that is).

The story itself is quite interesting though. Most of the book analyzes the situation that occurs when after New Year's Day, all the people in Portugal stop dying. For seven straight months, nobody dies, and all sorts of practical and philosophical problems come up. This first 3/4 of the book can get a bit redundant and long, but then at the end, Saramago introduces the character death, who refuses to capitalize her name since she is only responsible for the death of humans, and even more specifically, humans within Portugal. Death falls in love. It's a beautiful story. The last paragraph made me cry. A good book for sure.