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Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

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Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) famously responded to what philosophy calls "the crisis of the subject" - that nagging sense that one's identity is contingent, relative and inherently unstable - by developing multiple authorial selves, or "heteronyms": Alberto Caeiro, a bucolic providore of rustic verse; Alvaro de Campos, a strident modernist; and Ricardo Reis, a meditative pagan and classicist. Each wrote a poetry the others did not and could not write. In this way, Pessoa solved his problems of identity and poetry simultaneously. He recognised his multiple "selves" and set them free. The cultural transplantation he experienced might account for this. He was born in Portugal, but educated in South Africa where he learned to speak and write in English. He spent the remainder of his life in Lisbon where by day he translated business letters, and by night was a figure in the local modernist movement. He was probably an alcoholic, and lived in fear of insanity. (See Michael Hamburger's excellent study of modernist poetry, "The Truth of Poetry", for a lucid account of Pessoa and the significance of his work.) For those who know the story of Pessoa, Saramago's long and luxurious novel offers a delicious premise: Fernando Pessoa is dead, yet Ricardo Reis still lives. Indeed, three months after Pessoa's death, Reis returns to Lisbon from sixteen years of self-imposed exile in Brazil. It's 1936 and Europe is on the brink of war. As Reis contemplates re-establishing a life in Portugal, and pursues relationships with two remarkably different women - Lydia, a chambermaid; and Marcenda, the partially paralysed daughter of a wealthy provincial - the narrative becomes a reflection on Portuguese nationalism and literature, the temptations of communism and fascism, and various other philosophical probings. Saramago's style is infamously dense, full of elegant conceits, frequent circumlocutions, and seamless segues from nuanced prose to undifferentiated dialogue in paragraphs running over several pages. It's an effective, destabilizing technique for a novel which takes, in part, the contingency of identity as a theme. Experienced readers of "world literature" - especially Latin American metafiction and magical realism - who also have a firm grasp on Portuguese history and Pessoa's strange oeuvre will probably enjoy this the most. They'll see the connections: lines, moments and characters (both Lydia and Marcenda) from the poems, echoes of other Portuguese novels, staged conversations between Reis and Pessoa (who makes ghostly day trips from his tomb), and the more subtle in-jokes, such as the ongoing references to a book Reis is reading - Herbert Quain's "The God of the Labyrinth", a non-existent book "invented" by Jorge Luis Borges. The uninitiated, however, may well find all this immensely tedious. While the setting and events do provide some semblance of a romantic-thriller plot, the real joy of this novel lies in what is unsaid - in the way it uses the reasonably arcane knowledge the reader is required to bring to it.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Even `great' nations someday lose their vitality and turn into mere spectators of the fast changing events. When they fall on bad times, strange leaders take charge, holding out promises to restore the lost national pride. The demoralised people watch helplessly the systematic manipulation of their traditional values and institutions by their new leaders in the name of initiating a healing process. Portugal in the 1930s experienced such political diminution and its shameful aftermath.

This great sea-faring nation, which first charted the sea-route to India, was for years the world's foremost colonial power. Subsequent events, however, relegated Portugal to the background, leaving it clinging tenaciously to its few surviving colonies.

By the fourth decade of the twentieth century, Portugal's journey to obscurity was complete with the emergence of new power equations in Europe. During this turbulent period Portugal fell into the hands of the economist-turned-dictator, Salazar. This provided the ideal setting for a novelist who wished to capture the nation's aspirations amid widespread despair and its creative urges amid moral decadence.

The story of Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis begins with the quiet home-coming from sixteen years of exile in Brazil of the poet-doctor, Ricardo Reis. As he settles down in a hotel in Lisbon, we find him in the strange company of a dead poet Fernando Pessoa. Their encounters produce some of the most enigmatic moments in the narrative. Reis also strikes up relationships with two women, the hotel-maid, Lydia and an upper-crust girl Marcenda, with a paralysed arm. While Lydia readily grants him sexual favours and free house-keeping, Marcenda is quite tentative, self-absorbed and circumspect about herself and the relationship. The ambivalence about Reis's relationships with these women remain unresolved till the very end, when he finds that his time is up and he has to accompany his dead companion Pessoa to the other world.

But who is Ricardo Reis ? Saramago, in his Nobel prize acceptance speech, talks of his early love for poems by Ricardo Reis, whom he first took to be a real Portuguese poet. However, he later found out that " this poet was really one Fernando Nogueira Pessoa, who signed his works with the names of non-existent poets, born of his mind." Saramago learnt many of Reis's poems by heart and lines from his poems lie scattered throughout the novel. In the encounters between the real but the dead poet and his fictitious alter ego, we discover the contours of Pessoa's imaginative world and his philosophy of life. Fate and destiny are central preoccupations for both Pessoa and Reis. Reis, though a believer in gods, considers them powerless in changing the destiny of man. In one of his odes Reis writes, `I suffer, Lydia, from the fear of destiny', while at another place we learn that the `gods of Ricardo Reis are silent entities who look upon us with indifference.' He laments that man tends to forget the all-powerful fate, `Not seeing the Fates that destroy us, we forget their existence.'

Nature of truth, loneliness, transience and death are the other issues which recur all through the novel. The opinionated Reis and his reticent visitor, Pessoa often break into protracted arguments over these matters, and the author Saramago also joins in with his sardonic asides,casting to the winds all conventional rules of punctuation. Despite these authorial intrusions and witty repartees, a sombre mood prevails as death intrudes again and again into the conversation. While describing his own death, Pessoa comments,` Death too is repetitive, it is in fact the most repetitive thing of all.'

Although a novel of ideas, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is replete with sharp and loud images drawn from a colourful landscape and its sprightly people. The descriptions of the carnival, the theatres, the large statues on city squares, the maddening crowd at the pilgrimage centre provide the necessary balance to the haunting evocation of the grey world of death and solitude. The sea dominates the proceedings of the novel, which is inexorably linked to the destiny of Portugal; it provided the nation with its only source of power and glory. When other powers came to rule the seas, Portugal was reduced to a position of insignificance. The novel's opening line, `Here the sea ends and the earth begins', bemoans the snapping of this vital link and casts a despondent glance at a hopeless land. However,the despair is somewhat counterpoised by the diffident hope of the closing lines of the novel, `Here, where the sea has ended and the earth awaits.'

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis employs various techniques, both conventional and experimental to knit together a wide array of underlying themes forcefully. What comes through at the end is an exquisite work characterised by rare elegance and unity.

The greatest literature poses a problem for those who wish to praise it. Almost by definition, words are inadequate, because they cannot do justice to the richness of the language, the plot, or the ideas of their object.

That's the problem I face in trying to praise "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis." Anything I say will sound inadequate. In fact, for a reason analogous to that which lies behind the joke about selling at a loss but making up for it in volume, the more I say the more inadequate my effort is going to be.

So just a few words. I think "Ricardo Reis" is one of the great twentieth-century novels, a work that, by itself, justifies Saramago's Nobel Prize for Literature. Reis's obsessional behavior, his philosophical conversations with Fernando Pessoa, the evocation of a rainswept Lisbon just before World War II, the venality of petty martinets--all of these are presented with an awareness of universal truths and of human beings' complexity that reverberates deeply. It will enrich the life of anyone who reads it.

I do have a couple of suggestions for anyone who buys "Ricardo Reis." Look in an encyclopedia to see who Fernando Pessoa and Ricardo Reis were. It will help to understand the plot. And don't be put off by the way Saramago separates dialogue, with commas and a capital letter rather than quotation marks. It's not always easy to follow, but its effect, intended or not, is to give the dialogues a dreamlike quality that's part of the novel's appeal.

Also, if, after reading "Ricardo Reis," you visit Lisbon and feel the urge to visit the Hotel Bragança or the small public square with Adamastor's statue, you can. The Hotel Bragança is located on the south side of the Rua do Alecrim about 100-200 feet (30-60 meters) from the foot of the street. The square is not far from there, and you should be able to find it on a good city map. To see the hotel without the trip, use a search engine to locate "lusophone links" and you may find my website, which has photos of the hotel and of Saramago.

Incidentally, for those Saramago fans who await the translation of his recent novel "Todos os Nomes" ("All the Names"), I've already read it in Portuguese and it's excellent.

Saramago's novel is almost larger than life, despite being centered on a few characters, buildings, and streets in Lisbon between 1935 and 1936. In very few novels can one find such well-delineated characters (however small their interventions), such rich historical context, such well-crafted atmosphere. Ricardo Reis is not only the main character of the novel; he also is one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms (which allows Saramago to play a few good literary and philosophical tricks) and a symbol of 20th- Century man: an entity whose existential crisis leads him nowhere and saps him of his energy to act in any positive way or to have much empathy towards others. One doesn't know if Ricardo Reis' inactivity is reproachable or if one should feel any pity for him. The ending is very appropriate in this sense, because it leaves one thinking about what really goes on in Ricardo Reis' mind: did he have enough, or did he realize that, by just contemplating the theatre of the world around him, he wasn't going anywhere? Did he have, in the end, a moment of sincerity with himself? Those are questions that the reader should answer for himself.

I like Saramago's style (the same in all his novels) of just using commas, periods, and paragraphs. I also like his humor and pathos. I found myself reading aloud sometimes, even in English, because I felt that I needed to hear Saramago. Because of the lack of punctuation, however, it's somewhat tricky to follow who'saying what (particularly true in the discussions between Reis and Pessoa). But that should not deter anybody; rather, it should add to the enjoyment of the novel.

This book is usually on most readers' list of top three Saramago masterpieces. But in reading the English language reviews I realize that most people are missing a very simple aspect to the entire book. Of all of Fernando Pessoa's poetic personae, Ricardo Reis was the least politically engaged with the world, the artist in the ivory tower, contemplating the world of beauty. Saramago, as experienced readers intuit, is a very different sort of artist, for whom literature is a form of moral and political engagement with the world. Saramago has pointed out in interviews that one of the premises of this novel was the confrontation between the politically disengaged artist and an Iberia that was quickly becoming enshrouded in Fascism.

Understanding this confrontation might make this novel more sensible to English speaking non-Portuguese 21st century readers.

The cold classical odes of Ricardo Reis are for me the least engaging part of Fernando Pessoa's oeuvre, but this novel really brings them, and Ricardo Reis, alive. Saramago's portrayal of Reis is sympathetic but critical. In Reis's poem, 'I prefer roses to my country', he says "what does he care who cares no more that one should lose, another win, if dawn still sheds its beams..." But in 1936, this detachment is increasingly difficult, and as the novel progresses the real world increasingly sucks the poet in. The strongest pull comes from the poet's relationship with a chambermaid, Lydia, whose only resemblance to his idealised poetic muse is her name. Meanwhile, the shade of Fernando Pessoa watches over Ricardo Reis and the novel artfully draws the two poets together at the end. The book reads beautifully in translation and Saramago's style comes over as utterly unique. It is hard to pick out one example but here is Ricardo Reis soon after he has made a pass at Lydia: "What an incredible thing I've done, and with a maid. It is his good fortune that he does not have to carry a tray laden with crockery, otherwise he would learn that even the hands of a hotel guest can tremble. Labyrinths are like this, streets, crossroads, and blind alleys. There are those who claim that the surest way of getting out of them is always to make the same turn, but that, as we know, is contrary to human nature." By the way, if anyone wants a good introduction to the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, I'd highly recommend 'A Centenary Pessoa', published by Carcanet.

The previous reviewer suggested that the "ghost" character Pessoa may have been based on an actual person. It's true. Fernando Pessoa was an outstanding Portuguese poet. What's interesting here is that Pessoa wrote under several pen-names, and in some cases he would write praise or criticism in one pan-name of his own writing done in another pen-name. These pen-names were characters in and of themselves. The various pen-names had back grounds and histories which gave each one a unique perspective to "their" writings. One of Pessoa's pen-names was Dr. Ricardo Reis.

Saramago's Dr. Reis is faithful to the background devised by Pessoa, and the facts regarding Pessoa himself, so these conversations between Reis and the ghost Pessoa can be seen as conversations with one's self. It's brilliant. It's beyond brilliant.

If you are interested in an excellent Pessoa book, try The Book of Disquiet.

If you are a follower of modern European fiction always on the lookout for the next great European writer Saramago is your answer. He writes in a stream-of-consciousness style with long flowing river long sentences which recall James Joyce. Also like Joyce he is interested in giving you life in all its various aspects from high to low, sacred to profane, comic to tragic and this might be the thing which separates him from the pack and makes him not just good but great. But added to that Joycean interest in variety is a meta-playfulness which recalls Nabokov and Borges. Like Nabokov he is fond of pseudonyms and literary in-jokes but he is never haughty like Nabokov can be, in fact his sense of humor is self-mocking and this rarely encountered humility wins you over. Like Borges he enjoys putting his readers in a labyrinthes which present a challenge to traditional notions of reality. And most of all like his countrymen Eca De Queiros and Fernando Pessoa he believes that History is perhaps the biggest fiction of all and thus his fiction-makers obsession with it. Saramago you find out very quickly is a wise soul with a magnanimous spirit who has much to share.

Ricardo Reis is one of those characters who is not so much the master of his fate but a kind of passive onlooker and he is often looking into a mirror. He roams the labyrinthine streets of Lisbon perhaps uncertain whether he is seeking his fate or avoiding it and there he runs into someone he knows as well as he knows himself ,Pessoa. At the beginning of the book we know Pessoa has died. As the title of the book indicates this is the year Ricardo will meet his death. We know what his fate will be just as we know what Europes fate(and Portugals fate under Salazar) will be and so Saramago's book is a meditation on life just before it ends and history just before it happens.

Ricardos moments of poetic inspiration, and his walks through Lisbon, as well as his talks with Pessoa are merely desultory meanderings which lead nowhere in particular. The one thing that brings Ricardo into contact with life itself is two women. He falls in love with a young beauty with a similar paralysis of will but unable to act on this feeling he settles for the chambermaid who ends up pregnant. Even a poet who courts the muses cannot avoid coming into contact with the travails, the fates, that effect all of us. Portugal too is seen to be merely a bystander unable to do anything but react to or mimic events taking place in the rest of Europe. Just as Ricardos fate is inextricably tied to Pessoas Portugals fate is inextricably entwined with Europes . The miraculous thing about Saramagos gift is that he manages to be charming and humorous while conveying a deep affection for his ever elusive Pessoa(s) and his Portugal.

One of the epigrams at the beginning says it all. It is the poet Fernando Pessoa speaking: "If they were to tell me that it is absurd to speak thus of someone who never existed, I should reply that I have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or any other thing whatever it might be."

You might as well know this from the start, as Saramago doesn't reveal it in the book: Ricardo Reis is a fictional character invented by Pessoa before he died in 1935. Saramago picks up Pessoa's character, treats him as a real person, and has him return to Lisbon upon hearing of Pessoa's death after a sixteen years' absence in Rio de Janeiro. Who should show up but the ghost of Pessoa, who returns from time to time to have ironic (and deep) conversations with Reis until a point nine months after his death, after which he loses the ability? I will not reveal the surprise ending.

During his last year in Lisbon, Reis keeps picking up a mystery novel he had purloined from the library of the ship that had brought him over: Herbert Quain's THE GOD OF THE LABYRINTH but never seems to get very far. At this point, I refer you to Jorge Luis Borges' story entitled "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," who is, together with his book, wholly fictional.

In the midst of all these in-jokes, the amazing thing is that you can read YEAR OF THE DEATH without knowing of them and still regard it as one of the greatest works of fiction written in the last century. Ricardo Reis is a brilliant creation (whoever's it is), and Saramago brings him to life and sets him wandering the streets of Lisbon and agonizing about his love life and about whether he is to take up his medical practice or just retire. We see him from his point of view, from Pessoa's, from a hotel manager's, from the police's, and even from his neighbors and a couple of old men who hang out in the park across the street. What emerges is the most multidimensional characters in all of literature.

In the meantime, Europe is blowing up all around him. Spain erupts in civil war; Hitler's Germany invades the Sudetenland and begins threatening Danzig; and Mussolini has just completed a splendid conquest of Ethiopia. Little Portugal seems proud of its dictator Salazar, who was to continue for another thirty years, and hopes to get into the act, but can't decide what color its adherents should wear. The Nazis had brown; the Italians, black; and the Falangists, blue. (They finally settle on green.)

There are as many news items in YEAR OF THE DEATH as in John Dos Passos's USA trilogy. Saramago's political news and views drip with irony: The Portuguese are innocents about to view a vast bloodbath that spreads from its border with Spain to the steppes of Russia, but it hasn't occurred yet.

This is the second Saramago novel I have read, but by no means the last.

This is Saramago at his best. The very first sentence of the novel sets the mood. The writing has a dream-like, floating feel throughout. Saramago indeterminately mixes tenses; he often goes from "I" to "he" (speaking of the same character) in the same paragraph. But he does this purposely to enhance his idea of identity and relationships.

Marcenda's left hand is an additional character in the novel. In one scene it is described as appearing to "glory at being seen".

After reading "The Year of the Death of Richardo Reis" I can understand why he won the nobel prize. If I had only read "Blindness" then I wouldn't have understood. In my opinion, "Blindness" is merely an intellectualized Stephen King novel; intellectualized because of the writing and because it is allegorical. It reminds me of Camus' "The Plague". In and of itself "Blindness" wouldn't have deserved a Nobel Prize, but in conjunction with his other works, especially this one being reviewed, Saramago certainly deserves the award.

If you haven't read Pessoa but like Saramago, you should put Pessoa next on your reading list.