The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Rating:
Summary: It's a new style... and I couldn't understood it
Review: "Every new style in every sort of art, must demand a commitment. That is the only way to understand it". Unfortunately I couldn't...
As a literature reader fan, as soon as Saramago won the Nobel, I though "I have to read something about him". Unfortunately, the result was dissapointing.
I don't want to offend all the people that love the style of Saramago. The problem is that I found the book and the style totally boring and the result predictable (that's my standpoint, and I respect all the people who disagree with it).
There are however a couple of remarkable things in the book: The conversations with Pessoa and the ability to show some sort of fascination in an individual as Ricardo Reis, that really is a shadow.
My problem was that I found the book too boring to read. At the end I finished it, but with a big deal of pacience...
Two weeks later, I went to the bookstore and found some other books from Saramago. I found that his style was common in all of them, so I finally decided to finish my intend to read something else from him.

Rating:
Summary: A Portugese Requiem.
Review: After being deeply impressed by Saramago's "All the names" and "Blindness" I turned to this book that has been called "Saramago's best" and "among the best 20th century novels". While I greatly enjoyed the sumptuous prose of this book, the humorous faux naïve style, the often beautiful imagery and the sublimely packaged irony, I ended up less impressed than after finishing the two works mentioned above.

In his review Chinmay Kumar Hota has given an excellent sketch of some of the main issues of this book that I will not reiterate here. By juxtaposing the imaginary person Ricardo Reis with the actual, yet not less surreal, historical developments in Portugal in the 1930s Saramago offers a novel examining reality and human relations.

My main problem with the book- I admit that many may consider it its greatest strength- is that the writers tries to cover too many issues, while offering too little of narrative structure to make the book work. Especially, since Saramago separately dealt with two of the themes of this book in the more clearly structured "Blindness" and "All the names" and Murakami outdid Saramago on very similar subject matter in "The wind up bird chronicle", I ended this book a little disappointed.

There is no doubt of the elegant symbolism in the character of Reis. Returning from the colonial territory of Brazil he personifies many aspects of Portugal and its history. Similarly, the two ladies, female archetypes, Lydia and Marcenda, are symbolically loaded. To me, the dialogs between Reis and his deceased creator-yes, Saramago knows his Nietszche!- do not really ad to the main narrative. (Moreover, I thought that a lot of these conversations amounted up to little more than virtuoso sophistry). In addition, Reis on his journey from Brazil, to the hotel and his apartment and in his gradual degeneration is a depiction of everyman. Yet, to me all these ingredients never gelled into a work of unity.

While I enjoyed the stylish prose and Saramago's level of invention in this free-form-novel, I do think that the master outdid himself in the subsequent "Blindness" and "All the names".

Rating:
Summary: The few, The proud: The masochists!
Review: After being deeply impressed by Saramago's "All the names" and "Blindness" I turned to this book that has been called "Saramago's best" and "among the best 20th century novels". While I greatly enjoyed the sumptuous prose of this book, the humorous faux naïve style, the often beautiful imagery and the sublimely packaged irony, I ended up less impressed than after finishing the two works mentioned above.

In his review Chinmay Kumar Hota has given an excellent sketch of some of the main issues of this book that I will not reiterate here. By juxtaposing the imaginary person Ricardo Reis with the actual, yet not less surreal, historical developments in Portugal in the 1930s Saramago offers a novel examining reality and human relations.

My main problem with the book- I admit that many may consider it its greatest strength- is that the writers tries to cover too many issues, while offering too little of narrative structure to make the book work. Especially, since Saramago separately dealt with two of the themes of this book in the more clearly structured "Blindness" and "All the names" and Murakami outdid Saramago on very similar subject matter in "The wind up bird chronicle", I ended this book a little disappointed.

There is no doubt of the elegant symbolism in the character of Reis. Returning from the colonial territory of Brazil he personifies many aspects of Portugal and its history. Similarly, the two ladies, female archetypes, Lydia and Marcenda, are symbolically loaded. To me, the dialogs between Reis and his deceased creator-yes, Saramago knows his Nietszche!- do not really ad to the main narrative. (Moreover, I thought that a lot of these conversations amounted up to little more than virtuoso sophistry). In addition, Reis on his journey from Brazil, to the hotel and his apartment and in his gradual degeneration is a depiction of everyman. Yet, to me all these ingredients never gelled into a work of unity.

While I enjoyed the stylish prose and Saramago's level of invention in this free-form-novel, I do think that the master outdid himself in the subsequent "Blindness" and "All the names".

Rating:
Summary: astonishing
Review: Having read Saramago in Portuguese, I've always felt mixed feelings towards him. Firstly, there is his style: a racy, ponderous, even turgid Portuguese, with mamooth paragraphs, repetitions, amassing of details to the verge of boredom. However, when he applies such tricks to the depiction of an actual event, specially in a concrete historico-political setting, boredom becomes opulence, as in the case of his two "middle" novels, Baltasar & Blimunda (or _Memorial do Convento_) and this _The year of the death of Ricardo Reis_. When he decides to play philosopher and become "profound", however, as in his later books, then lushiness becomes simply boredom. I cannot but speak for myself and say that I never managed to finish anything he wrote after _Story of the siege of Lisbon_ . Therefore, if you've already read _Baltasar and Blimunda_, enjoy this book; if this is the first novel by Saramago you've read and you want more like that, read _Baltasar and Blimunda_. If you've already read both, then forget about Saramago.

Rating:
Summary: In the Labyrinth of Mirrors with the Muses and Fates
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Profound and -- at the Same Time -- a Great In-Joke
Review: One of the epigrams at the beginning says it all. It is the poet Fernando Pessoa speaking: "If they were to tell me that it is absurd to speak thus of someone who never existed, I should reply that I have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or any other thing whatever it might be."

You might as well know this from the start, as Saramago doesn't reveal it in the book: Ricardo Reis is a fictional character invented by Pessoa before he died in 1935. Saramago picks up Pessoa's character, treats him as a real person, and has him return to Lisbon upon hearing of Pessoa's death after a sixteen years' absence in Rio de Janeiro. Who should show up but the ghost of Pessoa, who returns from time to time to have ironic (and deep) conversations with Reis until a point nine months after his death, after which he loses the ability? I will not reveal the surprise ending.

During his last year in Lisbon, Reis keeps picking up a mystery novel he had purloined from the library of the ship that had brought him over: Herbert Quain's THE GOD OF THE LABYRINTH but never seems to get very far. At this point, I refer you to Jorge Luis Borges' story entitled "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain," who is, together with his book, wholly fictional.

In the midst of all these in-jokes, the amazing thing is that you can read YEAR OF THE DEATH without knowing of them and still regard it as one of the greatest works of fiction written in the last century. Ricardo Reis is a brilliant creation (whoever's it is), and Saramago brings him to life and sets him wandering the streets of Lisbon and agonizing about his love life and about whether he is to take up his medical practice or just retire. We see him from his point of view, from Pessoa's, from a hotel manager's, from the police's, and even from his neighbors and a couple of old men who hang out in the park across the street. What emerges is the most multidimensional characters in all of literature.

In the meantime, Europe is blowing up all around him. Spain erupts in civil war; Hitler's Germany invades the Sudetenland and begins threatening Danzig; and Mussolini has just completed a splendid conquest of Ethiopia. Little Portugal seems proud of its dictator Salazar, who was to continue for another thirty years, and hopes to get into the act, but can't decide what color its adherents should wear. The Nazis had brown; the Italians, black; and the Falangists, blue. (They finally settle on green.)

There are as many news items in YEAR OF THE DEATH as in John Dos Passos's USA trilogy. Saramago's political news and views drip with irony: The Portuguese are innocents about to view a vast bloodbath that spreads from its border with Spain to the steppes of Russia, but it hasn't occurred yet.

This is the second Saramago novel I have read, but by no means the last.

Rating:
Summary: For the initiated only
Review: 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 - and 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 from the poems (both Lydia and Marcenda), 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.

Rating:
Summary: A book not to be missed
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Ricardo Reis brought to life
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A supplement to the previous review
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.