The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
by José Saramago(1984)
Novelc. 380 pages
“We are the dreams of a god who chose not to believe in us.”
One great work, every day
by José Saramago(1984)
“We are the dreams of a god who chose not to believe in us.”
José Saramago(1984)
Saramago brings Fernando Pessoa's heteronym back to Lisbon in 1936, the year of Pessoa's death and the year fascism consolidates its grip on Portugal. Ricardo Reis, the imaginary poet, wanders a city of ghosts, visited by the shade of his creator. The prose flows in Saramago's characteristic unmarked style, blending interior and exterior, past and present. The novel is at once a ghost story, a political meditation, and a love letter to Lisbon and to Pessoa. It asks what it means to live as fiction in a world that has forgotten how to imagine.