“Ever wondered what it would be like if people stopped dying? That's right, not one death by car crash, not one successful suicide attempt, and not one death from illness or old age. That became a reality in a land-locked country in this book. As the new year began death (yes, with a small 'd') decided to hang up her scythe and leave the people of this country, and this country only, alone. As a result the church is upset (but when is it not), funeral companies are reduced to burying pets, and, worst of all, people suffering illnesses have no choice but to continue suffering while their families have to take care of them because hospitals are now overcrowded.
This is one very enjoyable book to read. It contains no quotation marks, something occurring all too often in modern novels. However, I found that once you get used to it, it becomes even easier to read than books with the quotation marks because it flows like a normal consersation in the absence of the 'he saids', 'she saids'. Saramago also had a habit of writing extremely long sentences, some of them of them being half a page long. However, it didn't cause me to lose interest at all. Saramago's lyrical prose more than makes up for what some may consider 'run-on sentences'. For days after finishing this novel, the book only taking a couple of days to finish, I was looking for those long, elegant and sometimes pantasmagorical sentences which had previously left me not wanting them to end, not wanting those smooth flow of ideas in the form of words to be interrupted by a full stop, or as some people call them, a period. 64 words. That was my attempt at writing a long sentence. It must be said that Saramago's writing style is not for everyone. I've read reviews of other books in which the reviewer expressed their unhappiness caused by them having to read a book in which the author took a non-quotation mark approach.”
Justin M wrote this review Tuesday, October 6 2009.
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