Wednesday, April 21, 2021

saramago, saramagoing, saramagone

You may recall that after the death of John le Carré in December 2020 I did a bit of retrospective rearranging of the curse list as a couple of entries were in the wrong order. Well today I made a more momentous discovery, which is that there are three entire entries missing, one from way back in 2010 and two from 2015. It was Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate José Saramago, who died in June 2010 after suffering from leukemia, about a year after his 2002 novel The Double featured on this blog, that I spotted first and by whom I was subsequently inspired to do a more general survey (though I make no claim that I still haven't missed someone). Not only did I miss Saramago at the time, but I also subsequently failed to register his death while mentioning him (and The Double) in this film-related post from last year.

The other two were David Cook, whose novel Walter featured here in February 2009, and William McIlvanney, whose novel Weekend featured the following year, both of whom died in 2015.

Saramago was 87, which affects the mean and median ages for authorial deaths pretty much not at all. The thirteen months or so the curse took to take effect on him makes it the third-quickest-acting on the list, the only two ahead of it speed-wise being the fates visited upon Michael Dibdin and Philip Roth. Cook was 74 and McIlvanney 79, so they drag the averages down a tiny amount (though I can't be bothered to do the maths); likewise at around 6 and 5 years respectively they slot into the middle of the curse length statistics.

It's been nearly fifteen years now, so there is an ever-widening list of novelists whose days may be numbered. A quick and fairly unscientific scan of the list suggests there are around twenty living featurees who are over 80 years old, and at least one (Milan Kundera) who is over 90. I mean, they might all have many years in them yet, and good luck to them; watch this space is all I'm saying.
 
Author Date of first book Date of death Age Curse length
Michael Dibdin 31st January 2007 30th March 2007 60 0y 59d
José Saramago 9th May 2009 18th June 2010 87 1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge 14th May 2008 2nd July 2010 77 2y 50d
Russell Hoban 23rd August 2010 13th December 2011 86 1y 113d
Richard Matheson 7th September 2011 23rd June 2013 87 1y 291d
Iain Banks 6th November 2006 9th June 2013 59 6y 218d
Elmore Leonard April 16th 2009 20th August 2013 87 4y 128d
Doris Lessing 8th May 2007 17th November 2013 94 6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez 10th July 2007 17th April 2014 87 6y 284d
Ruth Rendell 23rd December 2009 2nd May 2015 85 5y 132d
James Salter 4th February 2014 19th June 2015 90 1y 136d
David Cook 24th February 2009 16th September 2015 74 6y 205d
Henning Mankell 6th May 2013 5th October 2015 67 2y 152d
William McIlvanney 7th September 2010 5th December 2015 79 5y 90d
Umberto Eco 30th June 2012 19th February 2016 84 3y 234d
Anita Brookner 15th July 2011 10th March 2016 87 4y 240d
William Trevor 29th May 2010 20th November 2016 88 6y 177d
John Berger 10th November 2009 2nd January 2017 90 7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley 24th September 2011 28th February 2017 93 5y 159d
Helen Dunmore 10th March 2008 5th June 2017 64 9y 89d
JP Donleavy 21st May 2015 11th September 2017 91 2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin 6th December 2015 22nd January 2018 88 2y 49d
Anita Shreve 2nd September 2006 29th March 2018 71 11y 211d
Philip Roth 23rd December 2017 22nd May 2018 85 0y 150d
Justin Cartwright 7th September 2008 3rd December 2018 75 10y 89d
Toni Morrison 18th July 2010 5th August 2019 88 9y 20d
Charles Portis 3rd April 2018 17th February 2020 86 1y 320d
Alison Lurie 24th March 2007 3rd December 2020 95 13y 254d
John le Carré 21st February 2008 12th December 2020 89 12y 295d

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