Saramago, José : Death at Intervals

An unnamed country's inhabitants suddenly stop dying. Confronted by the logistical nightmare of logjams in nursing homes and hospitals, organised crime steps in where organised religion gives up. The first half of this sharp satire on our treatment of the old and infirm exercises a Swiftian rigour in taking a single idea and running it relentlessly through its ramifications; at which point larger politics are abandoned as death herself (bored, lonely, trapped in the most predictable job imaginable) reappears to walk and love among the living. The original title, "Death with Interruptions", perhaps conveys the philosophical import behind this thought experiment more fully. As Scheherazade clearly understood, a narrative is nothing if not an attempt to seduce and, in seducing, to postpone the inevitable. Then again, as Walter Benjamin also understood, a story is nothing without the retrospective meaning conferred by an ending. I wish more novelists writing in English exhibited this much intellectual ambition, and this much humanity and elegance in realising it.