Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Portuguese Nobelist Jose Saramago enjoys disorientating readers with his fable-like novels. He places unnamed characters in unnamed countries, then shatters their lives with bizarre events, such as a plague of blindness.

His latest book, ``Death at Intervals,'' depicts a nation where death has suddenly and inexplicably ceased to exist -- at least for humans.

Saramago, 85, opens with a satirical treatise on how immortality might affect society. The church would be superfluous, he writes. Ditto life insurance and undertakers. Retirement homes, by contrast, would be horrifically overcrowded.

The public is initially ecstatic, yet eternal life soon shows its sinister side. For people who were formerly at death's door, there's no hope of release, only suffering without end.

After seven months, a letter to a TV station announces that ``death took death away to show humans what eternity was like; the experiment failed.'' The Grim Reaper is back, dispatching purple notes to give a week's notice to those whose time is up.

When a meek middle-aged cellist returns his note, the reaper's minion investigates, disguised as a mysterious woman in dark glasses. Spying on the cellist, she becomes attached to him and begins experiencing distinctly corporeal stirrings.

Saramago's prose is less than inviting, despite Margaret Jull Costa's agile translation. He scorns quotation marks, resulting in a cacophony of voices: The cellist, his dog, even a scythe speak. Paragraphs extend over pages, some made up almost entirely of a single rambling sentence.

Yet Saramago is often subtler than his didactic plots suggest. Having mocked mankind's dream of immortality, he ends on a note that's both teasingly unresolved and unexpectedly hopeful.

``Death at Intervals'' is published by Harvill Secker in the U.K. (196 pages, 12.99 pounds).

`Age of Shiva'

It takes a bold man to write a novel from a woman's perspective -- especially when it starts with a steamy scene worthy of a bodice ripper.

``Every time I touch you, every time I kiss you, every time I offer you my body,'' Meera Sawhney gushes, too infatuated to complete her sentence as Manil Suri's second novel, ``The Age of Shiva,'' gets under way.

Tongues dart, fingers brush and limbs thrust before it becomes clear that Meera is actually nursing her infant son. Is this just a hopelessly male view of breast-feeding?

No, because the erotic, quasi-incestuous overtones suit Meera's character. ``The Age of Shiva'' stumbles not because Suri fails to capture a woman's voice but because he chose the wrong woman as his narrator -- a pampered child of a privileged family who winds up lusting after her own son.

Bollywood Goddesses

The story opens in 1955 and runs into the 1980s, capturing India's torrid early years as a republic and conjuring up a landscape where Hindu gods and Bollywood goddesses mix.

Though Meera's progressive father is an influential Delhi publisher, she finds herself playing second daughter to her fairer-skinned, prettier big sister, Roopa. Stunted by sibling resentment, Meera seeks revenge when Roopa makes her the go- between in an illicit romance with Dev Arora, a railway worker's son who dreams of becoming a singer.

Meera's plot backfires when she's caught in a compromising situation with Dev. At 17, she finds herself trapped in marriage, living in a two-room home with Dev's pious, provincial in-laws.

Smother Love

Things begin to look up when the couple moves to Bombay and has a son, yet Meera's love for baby Ashvin soon becomes possessive. Mother and son share a bed until his 15th birthday, excluding Dev with consequences both tragic and queasy-making. India meanwhile comes of age amid riots and insurgencies.

The plot dwells astutely on the challenges women face in a society where baby girls are vaunted as princesses, so long as their birth is preceded by a boy. Yet as Meera throws away opportunities and smothers her son, it becomes clear that her troubles are rooted in character, not gender. At every turn, she allows childish vindictiveness to triumph, making her oppressive company and muting the nuanced charm of Suri's prose.

``The Age of Shiva'' is published by Norton in the U.S. and Bloomsbury in the U.K. (453 pages, $24.95, 10.99 pounds).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.

Last Updated: February 19, 2008 16:26 EST