A man steps off a ship in Lisbon harbor in December 1935, returning to a country he left sixteen years ago, and the reader gradually understands that this man is not real: he is a heteronym, a literary persona invented by the poet Fernando Pessoa, who has just died. Saramago published this extraordinary novel in 1984, granting fictional life to a fictional poet and then setting him loose in a Lisbon sliding toward fascism. Reis wanders the rainy city, takes a lover, visits Pessoa's ghost in the cemetery, and reads the newspapers as Europe darkens. Saramago's sentences, long and unpunctuated, move like tides. The novel asks what it means to be alive when one was never more than words on a page.