It isn't necessary, but it adds greatly to the reading experience for this book if you've visited Lisbon...

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is a 1984 novel by 1998 Nobel Laureate José Saramago; it was first translated into English in 1991. It begins as Ricardo Reis arrives back in Portugal after sixteen years in exile in Brazil. He is a doctor, but it is not until the security police take an interest in his aimless activities that he takes steps to rent an apartment and makes a desultory effort to practise. Most of the time he wanders the streets of Lisbon in between torrential downpours or he idles away his time in eateries or his room. Reis as flaneur gives Saramago the opportunity to describe in vivid detail, the distinctive streetscapes and vistas of Portugal's capital city. If you've been there, you can see events in your mind's eye as Reis makes his way around the city.

While Reis's activities are aimless, and his often banal observations are not what one might expect from an intellectual and a poet, the characters are intriguing. Readers don't need to know much about Portugal's most famous poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), except that the titular character Ricardo Reis is one of the heteronyms used by Pessoa, and he has his own page at Wikipedia. In Saramago's novel, Reis wanders into Lisbon's cemetery, and meets up with Pessoa, and they have several other meetings thereafter. So yes, the novel is playfully absurdist, woven around an imaginary character in conversation with the ghost of a dead poet who had died months ago.

Along the way, Reis has an affair with a chambermaid called Lydia from the hotel where he first stayed, and an attraction to another young woman called Marcenda, who is a guest at the Hotel Bragança near the river Tagus. These relationships allow Saramago to depict status relationships: there is never any question of Reis formalising his relationship with Lydia because of the gulf in class between them. Indeed, even when he moves out of the hotel and into his own apartment, Lydia is not only his lover but also his charwoman. It is not until late in the novel when Lydia reports her communist brother's political opinions regarding the civil war in Spain, that they have a conversation about the fact that they do not have conversations because they have nothing in common.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/07/29/the-year-of-the-death-of-ricardo-reis-1984-b... ( )

Fictional biography of Fernando Pessoa, and his relationship with his personified "heteronym", Ricardo Ries; and Ries' own relationships with Marcenda (the girl with the limp left arm) and Lydia (the maid). The book (like Raised From the Ground) has a lot of Portuguese history enriching the text throughout, using contemporary events and newspaper articles. A surreal and fascinating read. Here are some of the contents I have highlighted from the novel:
The quote, "The Redcoats have reached the straights".
Portuguese New Year tradition of throwing rubbish from upstairs windows.
Letter sent poste restante.
Adamastor, a personification of the Cape of Good Hope, symbolizing the dangers of the sea and the formidable forces of nature challenged and ultimately overcome by the Portuguese during the Age of Discovery.
Newspaper articles of the time; Spanish leading up to a civil war, Nazi Germany flying their zeppelin over Portugal, death of King George, new king Edward; Italians in Africa.
Pilgrimage to Fatima, planes dropping leaflets advertising Bovril.
Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in the Thirty Nine Steps.
Portugal having a mock air raid in preparation for World War Two.
Adamastor waiting for Doris to arrive while Thetis sings.
Statue of Luis De Cameos.
Earth quake.
Impressed with the German youth movement, the Portuguese considering their own with SS ("Serve Salazar") on their belts.
Air plane crash, death of General Sanjurjo en route to Spain. General Francisco Franco declaration to desire order, the Spanish army task of Redemption, Moroccan soldiers arriving, a governing junta set up in Burgos, rumours of a confrontation in Madrid between the army and the forces. Population of Badajoz taking arms resisting the military advance.
"Tragic Sense of Life" by Miguel de Unamuno. ( )

I really struggled with this one. There isn't much plot: Ricardo Reis is basically depressed, largely giving up on life in his last year. His downward spiral was hard to read about. We know almost nothing about his past life, his younger years in Portugal or his later years in Brazil. His intellectual and philosophical interactions with the ghost of the recently deceased renowned Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa are highlights.

Interestingly, I did really warm up to Saramago's style of writing, which includes long paragraphs--sometimes relevant, sometimes digressions--flashes into the imagination that might seem like they are real events in the moment, and paragraphs of dialog unbroken by line breaks or identifying tags. As with Hemingway, it can be easy to lose track of who is speaking until a name or a subject startles you into the realization that you may have misattributed some thoughts--though that only happened a few times in the conversations between Reis and Pessoa. When Reis really has no intellectual or conversational equal, not even in the most exciting portion of the book when he's called in for interrogation by the police--it's rarely difficult to tell his dialog apart from that of the hotel manager, or his mistress Lydia the hotel maid, or sort-of-love the far-too-young and Marcenda.

Reis and Pessoa, who knew each other in Portugal in the past, are both poets--the former on the side of his doctoring career, the latter full-time. I wish that this edition had an forward or afterword explaining a few things for clueless English-language readers; it was sheer, lucky accident that I happened to pick up a book of poetry in Portugal, flip to the section of Pessoa's works, and find that "Ricardo Reis" is actually one of the many pseudonyms under which he wrote. Unlike most authors who use pen names, Pessoa gave Reis and each of his pseudonyms distinct personalities to reflect the different styles of writing used by each--according to ye olde Wikipedia, he called them "heteronyms". I'm not sure how much of Reis' personality was fleshed out by Pessoa and how much invented by Saramago. I can only assume that the snippets of Reis' poems that appear throughout the book are indeed from poems written under Pessoa's Reis heteronym.

I'm glad I finished the book, even if the story really wasn't to my taste. There's plenty of 1930s history on the edges, with wealthy refugees from Spain and direct talk of Franco's takeover, rumblings of discontent with Salazar's regime in the Portuguese navy, gobs of pro-fascist propaganda and events, and at the same time ongoing cultural events such as New Years celebrations and religious services in Fatima. There's just also a lot of very, very dull downtime with a shallow character whose depths seem to consist of the nothingness and indifference that I sometimes grapple with myself. ( )

This book blends magical realism, historical fiction, and literary fiction. The title character, Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, returns to Lisbon, Portugal, after living in Brazil for sixteen years. He stays at a hotel, encounters two women, is questioned by local authorities, and is visited by the spirit of recently deceased poet Fernando Pessoa, an historic figure. The year is 1935 to 1936, and the backdrop is the rise of the fascist movement in Europe.

This is a philosophical novel, filled with musings on life, love, art, literature, politics, religion, history, and death. It is character driven and the plot is sparse. The protagonist seems to be sleep-walking through life, withdrawing into his personal world, avoiding reality. He strikes up a relationship with a woman he considers beneath his station and longs for a much-younger woman for whom he writes poetry. He appears oblivious to the political situation taking place around him, though he reads the papers and recounts the headlines of the day.

Saramago is a keen observer of human nature. He inserts his wit and clever observations about life. He speaks directly to the reader, at points even referencing the reading process and preferences:
“A chambermaid appeared, but it wasn’t Lydia. Ah, Carlota, light a heater and put it in the lounge. Whether such details are indispensable or not for a clear understanding of this narrative is something each of us must judge for himself, and the judgment will vary according to our attention, mood, and temperament. There are those who value broad ideas above all, who prefer panoramas and historical frescoes, whereas others appreciate the affinities and contrasts between small brush strokes.”

Saramago’s style is not for everyone. He employs long paragraphs, stretching over many pages. Dialogue is embedded within these paragraphs. For me, this type structure is hard on the eyes, as it provides no natural stopping places for reflection (and this book requires lots of reflection). I have to say though, I found it kept my interest and I learned quite a bit about Portuguese history and literature.

Memorable quotes:

“Clearly man is trapped in his own labyrinth.”

“One reaches a point where there is nothing but hope, and that is when we discover that hope is everything.”

“Man, in the final analysis, is an irrational creature.”

“There is nothing more pointless in this world than regret.”

“One cannot resist time, we are within it and accompany it, nothing more.”

“Poets often begin at the horizon, for that is the shortest path to the heart.” ( )

An intriguing book. There is more going on in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis than the simple tale of a man returning to his native Portugal after sixteen years in Brazil. More than a tenuously-romantic relationship between this man and the chambermaid Lydia at the hotel he stays in. More than the crush he develops on a young woman, Mercenda, whose left arm is paralyzed. His brief, threatening interview with the Lisbon police. His ongoing conversations with the dead poet Fernando Pessoa. But what?

Jose Saramago's novel is full of small mysteries left unexplained: why Reis was exiled in Brazil – if in fact he was exiled, or merely chose to live there; why he returns to Lisbon; why the police are interested in a nondescript, middle-aged doctor who spends his days wandering the city and reading the newspaper. Even when Reis has indeed died (as foretold by the title), the book leaves the reader not surprised by the suddenness of the death but rather by the lack of a cause. If in fact it was a death, for the name Ricardo Reis is a pseudonym the actual, living Pessoa used, giving rise to the question of whether Reis himself is a real person in the novel or merely another ghost of Pessoa.

Saramago writes in long sentences and lengthy paragraphs that race along like wind-blown detritus. Yet there is a deliberate dichotomy between the pace of his sentences and the action they contain. They refuse to follow literary conventions – speech is not denoted by quotation marks, nor even broken into separate paragraphs when the speaker changes. The narrative tense shifts, sometimes mid-sentence, and the unnamed narrator often interrupts with his own commentary. At times you are not sure whether the action described is a figment of Reis' imagination or real events. But none of this is distracting; rather, it adds to the surreal atmosphere of the novel. It leaves the reader wondering what the novel means, whether it is supposed to mean anything.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is a stylistic departure from Blindness, his other novel I highly recommend. My translation was copyrighted seven years after the original publication, has no foreword, barely credits the translator, and has only the briefest of biographies of the Nobel Prize recipient on the back cover. This minimalist approach downplays the greatness of this book. ( )

Bókin The Year of the Death of Richardo Reis eftir portúgalska nóbelsverðlaunaskáldið Jose Saramago fjallar nákvæmlega um það sem titillinn segir. Sagan hefst á því þegar Reis kemur aftur heim til Portúgal eftir sjálfskipaða útlegð í Brasilíu til nokkurra ár. Hann snýr aftur eftir að hafa lesið um andlát vinar síns, Pessoa, og hann á síðan eftir að hitta þennan vin sinn reglulega og spjalla við hann enda er sagan skrifuð í með töfra-raunsæi sem Saramago nýtir sér til að skoða einstaka hluti út frá öðru sjónarhorni. Pessoa og Reis tengjast sterkum böndum enda er annar þeirra höfundarnafn hins.
Saramago sýnir sterklega stéttskipt samfélag og hvernig íbúarnir búa saman og tengjast í hugsun og orði. Fasisminn í Evrópu er vaxandi og síðari heimsstyrjöldin dregur nær.
Hann gerir þetta vel og innsýnin sem hann veitir í samfélagið sem hann skapar er eftirminnileg og heillandi. ( )

Ricardo Reis is doctor who has been in Brazil. He returns to Portugal and takes up residence in a hotel until he moves to an apartment. While at the hotel. Reis forms a couple relationships which both are questionable, one is beneath his status, another is a young girl with a disability. Reis is also questioned by the Portugal police with suspicion but not clear what they suspect. Reis moves shortly after this and takes on a locum tenen job. Ricardo Reis is in communication with the ghost of Pessoa. So I was thankful that I read Pessoa's list book; The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa used heteronyms and Ricardo Reis was one of those. The book is also, in some sense, an exercise in meta-literature. Fernando Pessoa had created the character of Ricardo Reis fifty years or so prior to its release, giving him a biography and writing many poems under that name. That Saramago would place the two characters side by side underscores a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, a common theme in Saramago's work, and a rejection of traditional limitations on narrative practices. Reis spends much of his time reading a novel called The God of the Labyrinth, a fictional novel mentioned by the writer Jorge Luis Borges and attributed to the title character of his short story "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain". This is also a story that reflects the historical time; The Spanish Civil War, unrest in Italy. the rise of fascism in Germany, unreast in Portugal. ( )

As an enormous admirer of Fernando Pessoa, and an avid reader Jose Saramago, I found this work absolutely perfect - kept in a pacing world of thought and pottering events. ( )

Eh. The concept was better than the execution. Sorry, but I don't care about Ricardo's bad relationships and moping. ( )

Always a big fan of Jose Saramago’s works. His writing style may be frustrating for the more prescriptive followers of grammar, but the context of Saramago’s writing can be deep and superficial at the same time. You know there’s more, but you really have to think about it. ( )

Saramago's writing is ever beautiful, his stories complex and careful. True to form, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is a quiet book with layers upon layers of wonder, meaning, and humanity--Ricardo Reis is a poet/doctor whose distinctive voice and character are both quiet and demanding, drawing in readers and pulling them forward through what unfolds to be a graceful and entrancing story. Stylistically and in terms of story, this is far from being Saramago's most accessible work, but it is worth every moment of reading for those readers who'll venture into it and become lost in its world.

Recommended. ( )

I loved this one my senior year. ( )

I think I would enjoy Jose Saramago's book so much more if he wasn't so bloody difficult to read. "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" could use a lot more paragraphs and a slew of quotation marks.

At any rate, I think Saramago is pretty brilliant and has interesting things to say, though I don't particularly enjoy reading him. I thought Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda had more of a payoff for the work than this book.

If you're going to read this, do yourself a favor and read up on Fernando Pessoa.... if this weren't a group read where someone pointed me to the Wikipedia entry on Pessoa I would have been completely lost. ( )

With the unswerving punctuality of chance, as I start to write something about The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis I hear, on a Thinking Allowed podcast on Thrift Culture, the admonition that one must always distrust nostalgia. Nostalgia is surely the dominant mode of this lovely quiet book, the sense of living in a lesser age, complex intellectuality gone, elegance in decline, yet retribution for political activities in those golden days still a danger.

So The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is not a hard-headed or hard-hearted book; in it are both the simple, easily available hotel maid along with the remote, wounded aristocratic lady, and a dead author who appears and converses with one of his created voices, one of his heteronyms, who somehow lives on. Magic times, the days Ricardo Reis lived after his creator Fernando Pessoa died. We are in a beautiful complicated literary land here.

In my review of The Cave I observed that that was not the book that won Jose Saramago the Nobel Prize, making him a great national hero cheered in the streets when the news arrived in Lisbon; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is.

So much better than the more famous Baltasar & Blimunda... This one is, indeed, worthy of a Nobel price winner. A magical book, extremely well written, with different layers and so many historical / literary / philosophical / political references. Just the fact of bringing to life one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms (Ricardo Reis) i.e. one of Pessoa's multiple writing personalities (not merely pen names, like someone put it rather simplistically in a comment above) against the background of a fascist and almost surreal Lisbon and, then, confronting him with the ghost of his creator (Pessoa) - is simply unique, sublime. ( )

DISCLAIMER
I read this book knowing nothing about Fernando Passoa, or his pseudonym Ricardo Reis. If I had known about these things, I surely would have enjoyed the book significantly more. This review will be most helpful for people like me: fans of good literature that know little or nothing about Portuguese history/literature.

SPOILERS
A poet-doctor returns from Brazil to his native Portugal after 16 years away and doesn't do much except start an affair with a chambermaid and visit socially with a recently deceased. Then he decides to die. If that sounds interesting to you, then you might like this book.

I suppose it's fitting that a book whose theme -- among others -- is the absurdity and pointlessness of existence should itself be thoroughly pointless. But that doesn't make it enjoyable. After an excruciating first 70 pages in which Ricardo does nothing but wander through the rainy city over a few days, the book begins to offer promise when he meets with the dead personage of his poet alter ego. But nothing comes of it.

The entire thing feels terribly bloated. Saramago offers up some terrific observations and beautiful passages, but his conversational narrative style is distracting and annoying at times, and his main character offers nothing sympathetic to grasp onto. Almost half the book is taken up by pointless tangents and cutesy side comments, which I would normally criticize for distracting from the plot. This particular novel, however, doesn't seem to have much of a plot. The side comments are best exemplified by this one, which takes place after Saramago narrates the specific details of a maid's lamp-lighting ritual:

Whether such details are indispensable or not for a clear understanding of this narrative is something each of us must judge for himself, and the judgment will vary according to our attention, mood, and temperament. p.105

The entire book is filled with such comments. While the last thought has some merit, I generally rely on an author to make the judgment of which details are and are not dispensable to his own narrative. Maybe I am too lazy or old-fashioned of a reader to fully appreciate this book, but then here Saramago appears to be writing lazily as well. Definitely not a good book with which to start your Saramago education. For beginners I would recommend more the only other of his I have read, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, not as challenging as this one and much more rewarding. ( )

1 stella in meno per le prime (circa) 100 pagine, poi c'� tutto Saramago. ( )

After reading this book S. is definitely among my favorite authors. I will also re-read Pessoa. If you don’t know Pessoa read him first. Some knowledge of Portuguese and European history will come handy: the excellent introduction by Giovanni Pontiero for this edition (Harvill-Harper Collins, London ) provides this. (IV-13) ( )

I have to be honest, this book is a complicated venture, both in terms of philosophically and just in terms of understanding the characters. What it helps to know from the outset is that Ricardo Reis was actually one of Pessoa's pen names under which he wrote odes of poetry. If you don't know that to begin with, this book seems slightly preposterous and confusing. It changes your perspective and enriches the text to keep this in mind, in other words.

The most interesting think about this novel, and in some ways it reminded me of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler in terms of its depth of layers even though the topic matter is different, is that Saramago's protagonist is Ricardo Reis. Yet, Ricardo Reis is repeatedly visited by the ghost of Fernando Pessoa. I've been recently obsessed with Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude, which was published after his death, so the timing with me reading this novel couldn't have been better.

Saramago on his own discusses identity quite a bit (perhaps the most with his novel The Double) so it's no mystery why he was so fascinated with Pessoa as a famous Portugese writer who began The Group of Orfeu but as a writer who created multiple extensive identities for himself.

The one aspect of this novel that did strike a note of discord with me is the politics of it. Saramago's politics were clearly different from those of Pessoa, who tended to oddly favor nationalistic tendencies. Of course, Saramago actually lived through WWII to see what Hitler was truly up to whereas Pessoa passed away in 1935. The novel takes place in this crucial year when Pessoa dies as Ricardo Reis is visited by Pessoa's ghost. Reis himself has his own separate identity and is his own human entity within this text, which had led me to believe initially that he was one of Pessoa's characters vs. pen names.

Whereas Saramago (who passed away quite recently in June of 2010 was a leftist communist, Pessoa was much more of a conservative who disliked communism, socialism and actually liked the British system of goverment and monarchies. In other words, Pessoa and I could have had great conversations about anything besides politics. I can only reconcile his politics with the fact that he lived in a much different era when systems of government were different and history had not left enough of an imprint on his soul.

In any case, Saramago is true to Pessoa's political sense in Reis. Reis is also, to put it bluntly, quite a cad. He seems rather bogged down in classist structure, for instance, and though he is more than happy to have intimate relations with a chambermaid, he feels uncomfortable kissing her on the mouth as she is below him in class. Yeah, I wouldn't clean his floors or change his bedding either. Pessoa visits him and teases him about these relations, not only because of class but also because of the irony of the name of the chambermaid being the famous poetic Lydia. Reis is a doctor but even more so, he is a drifter, and he writes random poetry but it's hard to like someone so villainous in his personal issues and so erroneous in his political processes. My guess is that Saramago might even agree with me but given the importance of Pessoa and how this author affected Portugese writers after his time, it makes sense that he would proceed with the text and honor reality. In other words, the blame for our weakness of the protagonist's character lies not with Saramago but unfortunately with the honest version of history. Still, the fact that I disliked Reis and viewed his thoughts and behavior at times as that of a scoundrel is the ONLY reason this novel isn't receiving 5/5 stars from me. Otherwise, it is a work of brilliance and a very worthwhile read.

Though the novel was written in 1986 with the obvious lens of learning from history, it is true that Saramago lived through this era himself. He was aged 13 when Pessoa died, in the year that the book was set. So one of the most interesting things about the book is how fascist the government is starting to get, how the Hitler youth are coming into Portugal and the Portuguese citizens area seeing zeppelins above them and how the Portugese government is even having staged practice attacks, which in and of itself seems absolutely surreal. This is the age when honorable citizens begin to look suspicious and where people are also talking about revolution. At the same time, the sick are taking pilgrimages to Fatima to cure them and there are still the common problems that many Portugese face in terms of lack of appropriate medical care, classism and poverty, and illiteracy that leads to hardships, gossip, and guesswork about international politics.

Learning about what it was like to live in Portugal at this time is not something I've had the opportunity to do before. The perspective I've come across more is that of people living in America, Japan, Germany, Britain, or even France in comparison. However, it's interesting to see what was going through the hearts of minds of the citizens of every country during this crucial moment of history if we're going to ever understand how something like the Holocaust could have ever taken place and how to prevent it.

Even more fascinating is, as ever, the way Saramago's lyrical writing style gives rise to such masterful philosophical musings. He is at his best in terms of these here and one can't help admire a man so adept at the act of writing itself and feel such a huge loss that he passed away from this world in 2010. One wonders if there is a ghost of Saramago lingering around the young authors of Portugal now, watching them drink coffee and asking them about what they read in the newspapers.

Favorite quotes:

pg. 8 "Climbing the front steps of the hotel, he realized from these musings that he was exhausted, that he was suffering from an overwhelming fatigue, an infinite weariness, a sense of despair, if we really know what despair means when we say that word."

pg. 13 "innumerable people live within us. If I think and feel, I know not who is thinking and feeling, I am only the place where there is thinking and feeling...Who is using me in order to think and feel..."

pg. 23 "When one awaits sleep in the silence of a room that is still unfamiliar, listening to the rain outside, things assume their real dimension, they all become great, solemn heavy. What is deceptive is the light of day, transforming life into a shadow that is barely perceptible. Night alone is lucid, sleep, however, overcomes it."

pg. 25 "Since the time of Hamlet we have been going around saying, The rest is silence, in the end it's genius that takes care of the rest, and if this genius can do it, perhaps another genius can too."

pg. 28 "In the distance he could hear the sound of a bell tolling, the sound he had expected to ear upon arrival, when he touched these railings, his soul gripped by panic, a deep laceration, an inner turmoil, like great cities collapsing in silence because we are not there, porticoes and white towers toppling...The great difference between poets and madmen is the destiny of the madness that possesses them."

pg. 37 "It never occurs to people that the one who finishes something is never the one who started it, even if both have the same name, for the name is the only thing that remains constant."

pg. 45-46 "It is rather like a castle made of cards, better for the upper part to be missing than to have the whole thin collapse and the four suits mixed up."

pg. 47 "Stones have a long life. We do not witness their birth, nor will we see their death...Truly it is not enough to engrave a name on a stone."

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. Once language has said all it has to say and falls silent, I wonder how we will go on living. "

pg. 49 "Silence descends on the city, every sound is muffled, Lisbon seems made of absorbent cotton, soaked, dripping."

pg. 63 "In the end we are like small children, orphaned, because we cannot return to our dead mother, to the beginning, to the nothingness that was before beginning. It is before death and not after that we enter nothingness, for from nothingness we came, emerging, and when dead we shall disperse, without consciousness yet still existing."

pg. 64 "Fernando Pessoa said for the time being it's allowed, I have eight months in which to wander around as I please. Why eight months, Ricardo Reis asked and Fernando Pessoa explained, the usual period is nine months, the same length of time we spend in our mother's womb, I believe it's a question of symmetry, before we are born no one can see us yet they think about us every day, after we are dead they cannot see us any longer and every day they go on forgetting us a little more, and apart from exceptional cases it takes nine months to achieve total oblivion"

pg. 78 "Inside the body, too, there is profound darkness, yet the blood reaches the heart, the brain is sightless yet can see, it is deaf yet hears, it has no hands yet reaches out. Clearly man is trapped in his own labyrinth."

pg. 106 "Sometimes a reply is not even spoken, trapped between one's teeth, one's lips, and if spoken, it remains inaudible, a tenuous yes or no that dissolves in the shadows of a hotel lounge like a drop of blood in a transparent sea, present but invisible."

pg. 123 "I cannot explain or sum up myself in a single action or word, even if only to replace doubt with negation, shadows with darkness, a yes with a no, both having the same meaning, but worse than that, perhaps they are not even the words I spoke or the actions I performed, worse because irremediable, perhaps they are the things I never did, the words I never uttered, the one word or gesture which would have given meaning to what I was. If a dead man cat get so upset, death clearly does not bring peace. The only difference between life and death is that the living still have time, but the time to say that one word, to make that one gesture is running out for them. What gesture, what word, I don't know, a man dies from not having said it, from not having made it, that is what he dies of, not from sickness, and that is why, when dead, he finds it so difficult to accept death."

pg. 160 "Were they to speak, they would say, I suddenly feel much better, may I go now. A foolish question, for as we all know the best remedy for a toothache is to walk through the door when the dentist calls."


pg. 190 "Solitude weighs on him like the night and the night devours him like bait."

pg. 193 "Death too is repetitive, it is in face the most repetitive thing of all."

pg. 209 "Ricardo Reis sees her. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, she looks up , anxious to make sure that the person she seeks really lives here, and she is smiling, it is a smile that has a future, unlike those reflected in a mirror, that is the difference."

pg. 273 "Ricardo Reis lets his eyes wander from face to face, they search but do not find, as if he were in a dream that has no meaning, like the dream of a road that goes nowhere, of a shadow cast by no object, of a word which the air had uttered and then denied."

pg. 297-298 "These two old men have never been to sea, but their blood does not chill when they hear that mighty roar, mighty though muffled by distance, it is deeper down that they quake, as if there were ships sailing through the channels of their veins, ships lost in the darkness of their bodies, amidst the gigantic bones of the world."

pg. 336 "He turns on his ivory colored Pilot radio. Perhaps the words we hear are more believable than the words we read, the only drawback is that we cannot see the announcer's face, because a look of hesitation, a sudden twitch of te mouth will betray a lie at once, let us hope that someday human inventiveness will make it possible for us, sitting in our own homes, to see the face of the announcer, then at last we will be able to tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and the era of justice will truly begin, and let us say, Amen."



( )

O ano é 1936. Médico, educado pelos jesuítas e monarquista, ele é um sábio capaz de contentar-se em assistir ao espetáculo do mundo, como diz numa das epígrafes do livro. Ele se vê confrontado com os acontecimentos de 1936 em Portugal e fora dele - de um lado, a ditadura fascista de Salazar; de outro, a gestação da Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Frente Popular francesa, a Guerra Civil espanhola, a expansão nazista na Europa.. ( )

Wonderfully leisurely, complex, often rather puzzling debate about the natures of poetry and death and their relationships with political action. A book you have to read with a street map of Lisbon by your side (or even better, sitting on a bench on top of a hill with Lisbon spread out in front of you): the rhythms of the city's peculiar geography are every bit as important to the story as the newspaper headlines of 1936 and Pessoa's poetry. ( )

The novel begins in the winter of 1935-36 when Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon from 16 years in Brazil. He is very much the flaneur in the Flaubertian sense. A doctor, he is not entirely sure why he has returned, at least in the early going. He contents himself with surveying the streets of LIsbon. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War is just getting underway. Stalin is sending advisors in support of the Republicans, Hitler is backing the fascists with serious armament, especially air power, which the opposition does not possess. In Portugal itself the long reign of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar is four years old. Salazar's policies will lead the country into a long period of economic and social stagnation, rampant emigration, that will transform Portugal into one of the poorest countries in Europe with one of the highest rates of illiteracy. The narrator's voice is essayist-omniscient. Unlike the more God-like authorial-omniscient narrator, who is above the fray, calm, often nonjudgemental, the essayist-omniscient is quirky, with personal habits of speech, opinions and sometimes as here a regional mindset. The great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa has just died. It is not until page 80 or so that we learn that Ricardo Reis is in fact one of the many pseudonyms used by Pessoa during his career. So who is Ricardo Reis? How is it possible for him to meet with Pessoa after his death. The reader doesn't know much about his history, except that he was born on Oporto. Yet he exists in something like the real world. He is just off a grueling Atlantic crossing from Brazil. He takes Room 201 at the Hotel Bragança. He enters into an affair with the chambermaid, Lydia. MORE TO COME. STILL READING. . . . I'm afraid this book has been sidelined by others. My major complaint is that the character doesn't become interesting to keep my interest. There's something very desultory to the whole thing and the reader's interest flags. I'll give it one more chance.

Saramago's novels leave me in awe of how deftly he balances history, literary allusion, politics, philosophy, and an intense understanding of human psychology. Even in translation, there are passages in this book so heart-achingly beautiful and overwhelming that I needed to close my eyes and catch my breath. Saramago creates a flow of ideas and images which fill to the brim whatever space of quiet and solitude I can give over to his words. I know that I don't yet know enough about Fernando Pessoa to fully understand this book, but I look forward to reading it again in a few years and seeing what more it has to tell me. ( )

A revelation since it's my first Saramago. Its many voices, the irony, the many layers, the political backdrop, but particularly the seamless writing fascinate me. The punctuation is extraordinarily successful, allowing flow and musicality. I'm adopting it. Have I used it here, I did just now, but the capital for i in English is a nuisance, Why give ego size. ( )

such an odd book, but my favorite of Saramago ( )