The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

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.

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 a

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.

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.

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.