Death at Intervals, by Jose Saramago, trans Margaret Jull Costa

An endless fate worse than death

Jose Saramago, Portugal's octogenarian Nobel Prize-winner and Communist militant, enjoys starting his books with a bang. The premise for The Stone Raft is a Pyrenean earthquake, after which Iberia floats off in the direction of the Azores; for Blindness, a pandemic of sight atrophy. In Death at Intervals, the last frontier of all is suspended. With nobody dying, society is again thrown into crisis. Problems range from the familiar (the economic impact of sustaining the interminably ailing) to those taken from Saramago's earlier work – the rage of a Church that has preached the Resurrection as its fundamental tenet.

As before, the story rapidly becomes personalised in the tales of the humble and devout. The subject of euthanasia is humanised through a woman's longing to bury her comatose father, her terminally ill child. Car accidents and crimes of violence present insuperable difficulties to hospital staff. The discovery that death is still a possibility in a neighbouring country gives rise to nocturnal border-crossings. Language ceases to fulfill its descriptive function: "New Year, New Life" is hardly appropriate on 1 January, when death itself has died.

Death then makes her appearance. Armed with violet envelopes, each marked with an individual name and due date, she brings an end to those selected to meet their destiny. This Death is not obliged to manifest as a skeleton with a cowl and scythe but can look as good as any young woman dressed to the nines, as when she singles out a solemn young cellist.

What results alternates popular folk-tale with Proustian philosophising, and an unpredictable outcome. As if in contrast to the initial cataclysm, Saramago's style is extended and dense. Given his lengthy sentences, playful asides and multiple digressions, it is a tall order for any translator to retain momentum. But Margaret Jull Costa again conforms to the author's injunction not to mess with his style, while recreating his apocalypse now. Readers new to Saramago are advised to suspend expectations, and follow the author's lead in leaping blindly into Armageddon until the text sweeps them forward – and sideways – into a welter of fresh ideas. If we need to work hard to read Saramago, he delivers the most we can ask, transporting us by an act of imagination to a place we never envisaged.