Immortal combat

In On Late Style (2006), Edward Said suggested the approach of death often provokes one of two reactions in writers. Some embody the popular image of the old sage, whose work reflects a new serenity and reconciliation with the world. For others, ailing health manifests itself as irresolvable contradiction and discord, provoking them to reopen unsettling and intractable questions of meaning and identity.

In Jose Saramago's novel Death at Intervals, death is the central theme and the principal character. Now 85, the novelist seems to parody the death obsession of a writer with his eye on the hourglass. By comically personifying the Grim Reaper as a woman, is Saramago going gently into the night, or mounting a futile rebellion against the injustice of mortality?

Death at Intervals is between Said's two categories of 'late style': it offers neither unbridled indignity nor the reassurance of moral closure. Outwardly, it is a fable about the importance of death to civilisation. The population of a country suddenly stops dying; Saramago grants humankind its age-old wish for eternal life in order to imagine its hellish consequences. But this is also a postmodern novel with a self-conscious authorial voice, drawing attention to its constructed nature and insisting on alternative interpretations.

This is the Portuguese writer's 14th novel, which is a significant achievement for any wordsmith, particularly one born into a family of unschooled peasants in central Portugal. 'We were a poor family with no education, with limited horizons, in a continuous line of illiterates, generation after generation. I read everything I could get my hands on - even newspapers I picked up off the floor. From reader to writer was a logical step.'

Saramago published his first novel in 1947, in his mid-20s, but then abandoned his literary pursuits and worked variously as a mechanic, a translator and a journalist. 'I didn't think I had anything worthwhile to say,' he says. It was only in his 50s that he came back to fiction.

He has written full time ever since and won international attention with his 18th-century romance Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - the first Portuguese to win the accolade.

Saramago's work has not been universally applauded. In 1991, the centre-right Portuguese government banned his heretical novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Saramago moved to the Spanish island of Lanzarote in protest. 'It made me indignant. After 50 years of fascist dictatorship, a democratic government decided to ban a book.' Even the critics remain divided. Harold Bloom has labelled him our greatest living writer, but John Banville has criticised Saramago's magic realism by arguing that 'reality itself is magical enough without inventing whimsicalities'.

'How is reality magical enough?' Saramago says. 'Reality contains nothing magical. Magic is the imagination. To classify my books as magic realism is Banville's responsibility, not mine. I consider myself to be a realist author who is free to walk along different paths and press different keys.'

There's an improvised quality to Saramago's writing that makes it read like speech. His run-on sentences spill into paragraphs that are often several pages long. Eschewing quotation marks, the dialogue of his characters merges with that of the omniscient narrator to create a sometimes disorientating melange of shifting voices.

'Punctuation is a convention,' Saramago says. 'There are languages which don't use it, but the speakers still understand what they read. When we talk, we don't use punctuation. My style began in 1979, when I was writing Risen from the Ground. The world I described was rural Portugal during the first two-thirds of last century - a world in which the storytelling culture dominated, and was passed on from generation to generation, without using the written word.'

The first half of Death at Intervals has little plot and considers the social and political consequences of death's departure. The state ponders how future generations will support a burgeoning population on old-age and disability pensions. Insurance companies seek loopholes to relinquish payments to the permanently undying. Republicans agitate for a presidential system with fixed mandates rather than a monarch subsisting in a vegetative state. People euthanise their living-dead family members by transporting them across the frontier where death remains active. The undertaking industry is reduced to arranging funerals for animals.

The author has never reached for the consolations of an afterlife. His old-fashioned atheism is most clear in Gospel, which depicts a megalomaniac God who engineers the martyrdom of Jesus to expand his following beyond the Jews. Saramago's new book again thumps his message home: despairing of the paradox whereby the cessation of death also spells the death of god, the clergy feverishly spin new myths to keep their straying flock within the fold. 'It is out there and so am I,' Saramago says of religion. 'We are incompatible. I can't tolerate it; it can't tolerate me.'

Saramago joined the Portuguese Communist party in 1969, when it was a vital source of opposition to the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, and he remains committed to the ideology. 'The Christians took refuge in Jesus to persevere in their faith, as I take refuge in the principles and ideals of equality and solidarity. It seems that everyone would like me to move over to capitalism, after the disaster of communism was put into practice. I'm sorry to disappoint anyone. Being a communist, in my understanding, is a state of mind. I shall never renounce that.'

Saramago has delivered lectures at international conferences attacking the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, and is most notorious for a visit to Israel in 2002 when he compared Ramallah to Auschwitz. 'In Ramallah I found the spirit of Auschwitz,' Saramago now says. 'While there is one Palestinian still alive, the Holocaust continues. Israel will never accept the existence of a sovereign Palestinian state.'

His fiction is less dogmatic. The Cave (2001) finds a potter and his family living on the outskirts of a housing complex and mall known as the Centre, which deprives them of their livelihood. In The Stone Raft - published in 1986, the year Portugal and Spain joined the European Community - Saramago's vision of Iberia as a free-floating landmass signified his concerns about Portugal's sovereignty when it aligned with its more economically powerful northern partners.

'My politics are easy to spot in my writing,' Saramago says. 'I believe that I'm an essayist at heart. I have a strong tendency towards reflection, which in theory would manifest itself more appropriately in the form of essays. But I don't know how to write essays, so I use the novel as a substitute.'

While most of Saramago's novels resemble fables, they never hinge on simplistic moral truths. His hallmark is to establish an absurd scenario, then trace its ramifications with clinical rigour. In Blindness (1995), a city's population is afflicted by an epidemic of blindness; yet it's not darkness, but whiteness, which replaces sight. He says it was his most difficult novel to write. 'It is a thankless task to create horror with one's own hands, even in the world of literature. I paid for it with several months of anxiety.' Death at Intervals developed in a similar way. 'In Blindness, I tried to look at the question: 'What if we were all blind?' Here the question was: 'What if death no longer killed us?' The idea came out of the blue.'

Saramago's female death persona would not seem odd to a Portuguese readership because 'death' is a feminine noun in romance languages. 'As far as we know, death has no gender,' Saramago says. 'Either that or it carries the gender attributed to it by the language in which we mention it. I had no doubt; in my book, death would have to be female.'

Saramago is calm about death, but doesn't think Death at Intervals offers any reassurance. 'If anything, it brings to light the one absolute certainty we have on this subject: we cannot stop death. By accepting this, I think, we show our wisdom.'

A version of this article first appeared in the Financial Times. Saramago's answers were translated by Thomas Jayes.

Writer's notes

Name: Jose Saramago

Genre: magic realism

Latest book: Death at Intervals, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Current project: a novel called

The Journey of the Elephant

Age: 85

Family: Married to second wife Pilar del Rio, one daughter, Violante

Lives: Lanzarote, Spain

Other books translated into English: Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (1977), Journey to Portugal (1981), Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1986), The Stone Raft (1986), The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Blindness (1995), All the Names (1997), The Tale of the Unknown Island (1997), The Cave (2001), The Double (2003), Seeing (2004)

Other jobs: journalist, car mechanic, translator, political activist, publishing house manager, civil servant, draughtsman

What the critics say:

'In the craft of the sentence, Jose Saramago is one of the great originals. His prose is a voice that envelops all voices: it is like the universe's immanent murmur... No one writes like Saramago, so solicitous and yet so magnificently free' - The Guardian