Harder to relate if you're not Portuguese

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	• Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Panther) Jose Saramago Harvill Pr, 1998 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brilliant and Disturbing

I highly recommend this great book by a great, Nobel-Prize winning author. It is so well written that it almost rises to a book of poetry, vaguely reminiscent of fellow Nobel-Prize winning William Faulkner; the psychological drilling is deep, but worth the effort. Though Saramago's writings are more structured and less rambling than Faulkner's, the passion, the tone, and the eloquence are the same, at least for me.

This book is all about out-of-control circumstances in pre-War Portugal and how a fictitious doctor and poet of pre-War Portugal, Ricardo Reis, deals with them. Insanity is in the air, and deadly nationalism is rising along with the military coups and Nazism in neighboring countries. Quite by chance, he arrives in his native Portugal in 1936 just in time for this brewing storm, after spending the previous 16 years in Brazil. It reminds me a lot of the great and disturbing 70's movie Cabaret, where pre-War, Brown-shirt Germany was seen through the prism of a decadent Berlin cabaret, and the people who worked or played there.

Ricardo Reis does little else than think; it is his way of life, and circumstances give him a lot to work with. He is very much a loner, passably sociable on the outside, but self-centered, moody, timid, guarded on the inside, a lot like you and me if we were honest enough with ourselves. But unlike most of us, I hope, his most intimate relationship seems to be with Death itself. This might be the logical end of existentialist thought; things are bad, God is non-existent or non-caring, Death is the answer. (I think Life is the answer, and the transcendent Christian God who gives peace despite circumstances.)

In a nutshell, I like HOW Saramago writes more than WHAT he writes about.

The book is a bit heavy but well worth the read.

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Brilliant book but easy to misunderstand

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.

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Harder to relate if you're not Portuguese

Saramago is my favorite living author, yet I felt I missed a lot of this novel's power simply because I am not very familiar with Portuguese literature (Pessoa and other writers), culture or history. I am familiar enough with 20th century history and the years leading up to World War II, so I wasn't completely lost, but I suspect if I had been raised in Portugal I would have given this novel a much higher rating. Some knowledge of Franco's rise to power in Spain would also increase your enjoyment of this work.

Even missing some of this knowledge, Saramago's writing is still a wonder to me. Although it can be dense and demanding, he always has had the ability to keep me focused and turning pages and this novel was no exception. His characters and their thoughts are, as always, well-developed and you can easily see some of yourself in each one of them.

I recommend it as a strong piece of writing, with the caveat that you might not get all of what he intended his readers to get out of the novel if you are not familiar with Portugal's history and culture or with the state of geopolitics in the 1930s.

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Saramago At His Best

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.

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A supplement to the previous review

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

The year: 1936. Europe dances while an invidious dictator establishes himself in Portugal. The city: Lisbon-gray, colorless, chimerical. Ricardo Reis, a doctor and poet, has just come home after sixteen years in Brazil. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

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