Ricardo Reis, a poet and doctor, after many years of self-imposed exile in Brazil, returns to his homeland. Lisbon is gloomy and colorless, appearing chimerical. Instead of attending to patients, he wanders the streets of the city for hours. He longs for the elusive Marcenda, a young woman whose left arm has mysteriously become paralyzed, but it is Lydia who shares his bed, the chambermaid of the hotel where he is staying.
Until an old friend visits him, Fernando Pessoa, still wearing the suit in which he was buried a few weeks earlier. We find ourselves at the dawn of 1936, a new year that is the true protagonist of this novel. Because, in the meantime, the history of the era is being written, with the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, as well as the struggle of the unstable democracy in Spain. Reis, one of Pessoa's heteronyms, will be tempted to live and act, but he will remain a spectator of the world.
One of the masterpieces of Nobel laureate José Saramago in a new translation and edition. "The Year of Ricardo Reis's Death, published in 1984, is one of the high points of Saramago's literary output. Typically, the action of the novel takes place in Lisbon during the dictatorship in the year 1936, but it possesses a fantastic atmosphere which he stirs in an unprecedented way.
This atmosphere is emphasized by the repeated visits of the deceased poet Fernando Pessoa to the home of the central character (also a product of Pessoa's literary output) and their discussions on the limitations of human existence [...]. With the multifaceted narrative art that he painstakingly created, Saramago occupies a prominent position.
Within his own artistic independence, Saramago recalls a tradition which, in some way, in today's context, can be classified as radical. His literary work presents itself as a series of designs where one almost condemns the other, yet all represent new attempts to approach the fleeting reality." Swedish Academy Excerpt from the reasoning for awarding José Saramago the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
