The novel has been compared to the works of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and even Albert Camus. Like Camus’ The Plague , it uses a biological phenomenon (death’s absence) to explore how societies cope with the irrational. But Saramago is funnier, messier, and more optimistic. He believes that even Death can learn.
She checks her records. The cellist is still alive. She has made a mistake.
The cellist, unaware of her identity, treats her with kindness. He offers her soup. He asks her to stay. And Death, the eternal abstraction, begins to feel something she has never felt before: vulnerability, desire, and a terrifying longing for mortality.
La novela comienza con una frase que ha pasado a la antología de la literatura contemporánea: "Al día siguiente no murió nadie" . Este acontecimiento, que en un principio parece un milagro, una victoria de la humanidad sobre su mayor enemiga, se produce en un país sin nombre (aunque se intuye Portugal) a primera hora de un año nuevo.
In the second half the tone shifts from political satire to an intimate fable. Death returns but she has changed her tactics. She begins sending violet-colored letters to individuals warning them they have one week to live. This introduces a new form of psychological torture as people count down their final hours. The narrative then follows Death herself as she takes on a human form to investigate a cellist who refuses to die. His letters keep returning to her desk unopened and ignored.
"She, who had never known what it was to be alive, suddenly discovered that she would like to know what it was to die."