Who Needs Death? 
 This is the first Saramago book that I have read, but it will not be the last. I had previously been put off by the physical appearance of his text--those rectangular blocks of gray print with no indents, no quotations, and very few paragraphs. But what I had not realized was the depth of his intelligence, the brilliance of his invention, or most importantly the extent of his wit. This is a satire, based on the simple premise that Death, or rather the small-d death responsible for this particular country, takes a seven-month holiday and in all that time no one dies. A good thing? Not necessarily, because the inability to die affects also the terminally ill and the victims of horrendous road accidents, so that soon the hospitals, hospices, and eventide homes are full to bursting. The undertakers are out of work. Before long, the maphia (sic) have gone into the business of transporting moribund family members over the border so that they may end their lives elsewhere. 
 But Saramago does much more than merely play with amusing what-ifs; there are philosophical implications also. There is, for instance, a telephone conversation early in the book between the prime minister and the cardinal. While the politician juggles impressively vapid press-releases, the churchman points out that without death there is no need for a church, and that it is his duty to pray for the resumption of death so that his flock may ascend to eternal life. Of all the numerous targets in the book (the author is an equal-opportunity skeptic), Saramago reserves his strongest ire for organized religion; as one of the characters remarks, "god is god and he's done almost nothing but fail." But it is not just the church that needs death; Saramago's point is that it is vital to life, and indeed we should all welcome it, even in its unpredictability. 
 None of the people in the book are given proper names. Nonetheless, individual characters do begin to emerge, starting with death herself (for in romance languages the word for death is always feminine). Even when she decides to resume work, there is one person (a professional cellist--Saramago clearly knows music) who somehow manages to elude her. So she visits his home, watches him walking his dog, attends his rehearsals and one of his performances, and finds herself falling in love. The book, which had begun as an intellectual game, ends in warm humanity. Medieval artists used to depict the Dance of Death as a sinister reaping by a skeleton with a scythe. Saramago gives us a dance with death, in the form of an attractive young woman who comes into our willing embrace. Would it were ever so!