title: Death with Interruptions
author:  Jose Saramago 
description: Starred Review. Saramago's philosophical page-turner hinges on death taking a holiday. And, Saramago being Saramago, he turns what could be the stuff of late-night stoner debate into a lucid, playful and politically edgy novel of ideas. For reasons initially unclear, people stop dying in an unnamed country on New Year's Day. Shortly after death begins her break (death is a woman here), there's a catastrophic collapse in the funeral industry; disruption in hospitals of the usual rotational process of patients coming in, getting better or dying; and general havoc. There's much debate and discussion on the link between death, resurrection and the church, and while the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill into bordering countries leads to government collusion with the criminal self-styled maphia, death falls in love with a terminally ill cellist. Saramago adds two satisfying cliffhangershow far can he go with the concept, and will death succumb to human love? The package is profound, resonant andbonusentertaining. <i>(Oct.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Between her obscenely muscular new capoeira teacher, her crush going off with
  a new girl in their favorite park, and trigonometry homework, Kia figures she
  has enough going on without some creepy ghost causing car crashes and hit-and-
  runs in her neighborhood. Carlos Delacruz, the half-dead half-resurrected
  soulcatcher for the New York Council of the Dead, would love to keep her out
  of it, but things don’t usually go the way he intends. From the world of
  Daniel José Older’s immensely popular Bone Street Rumba series.
  
  
  _Carlos_
  
  
  “What song is that, man?”
  
  
  I don’t move. The rumble of this ambulance’s diesel engine fills the air
  again, the smell of night, the park around us. If I hold still, if Victor
  shuts the fuck up, if nothing happens for another few seconds, maybe I can
  sink back in, grasp hold of that fragile thread of an ech