This book has simple sentences like this scattered through it. They’re things you know, but forget. Your loved ones will die, so make the most of the time you have. I suppose I don’t like to look at members of my family [...]]]> “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

This book has simple sentences like this scattered through it. They’re things you know, but forget. Your loved ones will die, so make the most of the time you have. I suppose I don’t like to look at members of my family and think about them dying, so I push the thought away. Reading this book, I was unable to push anything away. I will die one day, and so will everyone I know. A simple thought, and not necessarily a depressing one if instead of getting immobilised by preemptive grief I decide to take action, to show people that I love and appreciate them, to call them more, to spend more time with them, to forget the little grudges and niggles that really don’t matter.

Joan Didion’s loss is twofold – first her daughter goes into intensive care on Christmas morning, and then just before New Year’s Eve her husband dies instantly of a massive heart attack. The book explores the process of grieving, which starts with numbness, and moves through denial and magical thinking (imagining John is still alive, and that she can’t throw out his shoes because he’ll need them when he comes back). Only later does she really start to understand that he’s dead and to grieve for him.

The book is full of beautiful sentences and painful observations. She avoids places she went with John, but finds even the loosest connections taking her back down into the vortex, thinking of him and their times together and being unable to function in the real world. The narrative flits back and forth between past and present just as her thoughts must have done throughout that year.

And then, at the end, she realises that a year has passed. Until now she has kept time by looking back to what she was doing with John the year before, but now for the first time she realises that her memory of that day a year ago is a memory that doesn’t involve John. She is scared of going on into the next year, of summer coming, of her memory of John becoming less immediate, less raw. She feels it is a betrayal, to let him go like that, to become just a memory. She doesn’t want to “move on” as she is supposed to – she wants to keep John with her.

There were so many other parts of this book that I liked. The writing is quite restrained – she doesn’t try to play it up or describe herself bawling and tearing her hair out. It’s a quiet kind of grief, but a powerful one. I got a real sense of her love and intimacy with her husband, and how painful it was to let him go.  I can see myself reading this again in a little while, just to remind myself of the truths I prefer to forget.

At first this news is greeted with elation. It’s the end of Death’s age-old tyranny, the greatest fear suddenly removed. But then [...]]]> I love the premise of this book. One day, in a particular country, people stop dying. They still get old, get sick, get mangled in car accidents, etc., but they can’t die.

At first this news is greeted with elation. It’s the end of Death’s age-old tyranny, the greatest fear suddenly removed. But then the complications begin. People still suffer, old people lie in bed on the verge of death but unable to cross over. Retirement homes go into crisis, as people continue to arrive but nobody leaves. Funeral homes and life insurance companies are also distraught, although the insurance people manage to land on their feet as always. Bishops and philosophers meet to discuss the implications of death’s disappearance. The fear of death has long been the basis of morality and religion, after all.

Meanwhile, some people take matters into their own hands. A family decides to put its terminally ill father out of his misery by taking him across the border into the neighbouring country where death is still operating as usual. This becomes a trend and then starts a whole industry, which is soon taken over by the mafia. Then, after a while, death reappears…

It’s an incredibly imaginative story, and well told. The style is very wordy, with some sentences stretching over pages, and multiple sub-clauses. The dialogue is also not separated by paragraphs or inverted commas, so it can be quite hard to follow sometimes. In general the wordiness works, simply because it is so well-written, but at times I wished he would just get on with it. I do have to put in a mention for the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, as well. This must have been a tough book to translate, and the fact that those long sentences are at all intelligible is a tribute to her ability.

This is the second book I’ve read by 1998 Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, the other one being The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. I enjoyed this one more, perhaps because of the fascinating premise and the deft way in which it was handled, or perhaps simply because his style takes some getting used to. I’d definitely like to read more of his work now.

Tolstoy’s main target here is dishonesty and hypocrisy. This is established from the [...]]]> A man dies slowly and in great agony. He ponders the meaning of life, and this increases his anguish: even worse than the physical pain of a slow, lingering death is the spiritual anguish of realising he has wasted his life.

Tolstoy’s main target here is dishonesty and hypocrisy. This is established from the opening scene, when Ivan Ilyich’s death is announced, and the reaction of his colleagues is to think about how this will affect their promotion chances, while speaking the usual lines about it being a “sad business” and so on. Even his widow, Praskovya Fiodorovna, is more concerned about herself than her dead husband: after telling a mourner about his three days and nights of incessant screaming, she says “Oh, what I have gone through!” Then she tries to find out how she can increase the government pension money due to her from her husband’s death.

Then Tolstoy takes us on a quick tour back through Ivan Ilyich’s life, showing us that he also participated fully in this dishonesty, concerning himself with appearances and advancement. In every decision, even marriage, he is heavily influenced by what other people will think. With each promotion in his career as a judge, he attains more power and money, but it’s never enough. At each stage he simply spends more money imitating people higher in the social scale than he is, and wanting to attain that next level. It’s not coincidental that he sustains his fatal injury while climbing a ladder to show a workman exactly how he wants a new curtain to be hung. The novel is saturated with vanity, pettiness and materialism, and they cause Ivan Ilyich’s spiritual and physical death.

Long before Kubler-Ross, Tolstoy hit on the stages of grief in the character Ivan Ilyich. He goes through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, although not always in that order. He often swings violently between the different emotions, depending on his own state of mind and on outside events like a doctor getting his hopes up.

The only examples of honesty in the book are in children (both Ivan Ilyich’s own childhood and his young son Vassya) and in the character of Gerassim, the butler’s assistant. Vassya and Gerassim don’t lie to him or see him as an inconvenience – they display simple human affection and love for him.

Indeed, love seems to be what Tolstoy is saying life is all about – not romantic love necessarily, but a broader kind of love for your fellow human beings and for God. This is what was missing from Ivan Ilyich’s life as he immersed himself in petty advancement and the acquisition of meaningless accoutrements. This deathbed revelation at first causes him great agony as he rages against all the lost time, but in the end it’s what allows him to find peace.