11-23-08 Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago - Fiction

4 - This one was odd. Saramago's writing style was a little strange, to say the least: a sentence could go on for five or more lines, a paragraph could go on for two pages, and dialogue wasn't marked with quotation marks or even new paragraphs. But the story. As of the last stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, no one died. In the entire country. That's not to say everyone became healthy. If you were on the verge of death at 11:59 New Year's Eve, you were on the verge of death two weeks later. You just cannot die. The government starts to try and deal with the immediate and foreseeable problems involved in running a country that will age, but won't die. And then, months later, death sends a letter to the head of the television bureau that starting at the last stroke of midnight, everyone who should have dies in the previous months will die and now, to be polite, death will send out letters one week prior to dying so people can get their affairs in order. Oh yeah, this one's strange.