The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)

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. ( )