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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For the initiated only, May 23, 2004
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.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History throgh the eyes of a dead poet, December 1, 1999
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.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Among the great novels of the 20th century, October 23, 1999
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.
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