The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero, Portuguese writer José Saramago’s surreal historical novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), has received much acclaim as a signature example of Saramago's idiosyncratic style, which blends elements of magical realism with historical fiction by way of endlessly long, meandering sentences that make minimal use of punctuation. The novel won an Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Saramago's Ricardo Reis is, in a sense, a historical figure, named after one of celebrated Portuguese Modernist Fernando Pessoa's many literary alter egos/nom de plumes. Over the course of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Reis meets regularly with the ghost of Pessoa. Exiled in Brazil since 1919, Reis has only been able to return to Lisbon because of Pessoa's death. Now 1935, the novel takes place against the backdrop of the rise of totalitarianism in Portugal, and, indeed, much of Europe. Formerly a doctor, Reis chooses not to practice medicine back in Portugal. Instead, he rents a room in a hotel and spends his days doing nothing. He becomes a flâneur, wandering the streets observing, commentating, and generally being both elegantly restless and elegantly useless. His favorite pastime is reading a book called The God of the Labyrinth, by the fictional Herbert Quain. This book and its author allude to a short story of Jorge Luis Borges' called “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain.”

While wandering through the streets of Lisbon, Reis, after a stop by the cemetery where Pessoa is buried, encounters Pessoa's ghost. Following this initial meeting, they converse a number of times. Their conversations are wide-ranging, philosophical, and bizarre, spanning history, politics, religion, literature, and the arts—and life itself. The novel's strange lack of action (even Reis's one love affair is lackluster and thwarted by his persistent feelings of estrangement) makes a deliberate contrast to the political chaos and social upheaval going on in the background. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis comes to a singular, but appropriate close with Reis's death. Having discovered that Lisbon's cemetery contains a whole other Lisbon, the dead mirror image of the living Lisbon, Reis dies, finally, by simply donning his jacket and walking with Pessoa to the cemetery, where he joins the ranks of this other city.

It is impossible to appreciate The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis without coming to appreciate its language. Saramago's works, like Woolf's or Hemingway's or Joyce's, are as much about the way he writes as the actual characters and plots. This is, of course, true of all writers—but Saramago, like the aforementioned authors, intentionally pushes this aspect of his novels to the forefront. His impossibly long, delicate sentences each contain several observations and, often, more than one point of view. Saramago regularly pops into his own narrative, suddenly switching from the third person to first and then back.

Saramago's style helps to convey the natural movements and patterns of thought in a striking manner. In some ways, that is as much the subject of Saramago's novel as Lisbon's history or the figure of Reis himself. That is, Saramago's immersive, present-tense narration centers the subjectivity of its protagonist as an explicitly subjective experience; not an objective, “true” depiction of events, but a process of active narration that blends fact and fiction into a seamless and symbolic whole.