The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
I have to be honest, this book is a complicated venture, both in terms of philosophically and just in terms of understanding the characters. What it helps to know from the outset is that Ricardo Reis was actually one of Pessoa's pen names under which he wrote odes of poetry. If you don't know that to begin with, this book seems slightly preposterous and confusing. It changes your perspective and enriches the text to keep this in mind, in other words.The most interesting think about this novel, and in some ways it reminded me of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler in terms of its depth of layers even though the topic matter is different, is that Saramago's protagonist is Ricardo Reis. Yet, Ricardo Reis is repeatedly visited by the ghost of Fernando Pessoa. I've been recently obsessed with Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude, which was published after his death, so the timing with me reading this novel couldn't have been better.Saramago on his own discusses identity quite a bit (perhaps the most with his novel The Double) so it's no mystery why he was so fascinated with Pessoa as a famous Portugese writer who began The Group of Orfeu but as a writer who created multiple extensive identities for himself. The one aspect of this novel that did strike a note of discord with me is the politics of it. Saramago's politics were clearly different from those of Pessoa, who tended to oddly favor nationalistic tendencies. Of course, Saramago actually lived through WWII to see what Hitler was truly up to whereas Pessoa passed away in 1935. The novel takes place in this crucial year when Pessoa dies as Ricardo Reis is visited by Pessoa's ghost. Reis himself has his own separate identity and is his own human entity within this text, which had led me to believe initially that he was one of Pessoa's characters vs. pen names.Whereas Saramago (who passed away quite recently in June of 2010 was a leftist communist, Pessoa was much more of a conservative who disliked communism, socialism and actually liked the British system of goverment and monarchies. In other words, Pessoa and I could have had great conversations about anything besides politics. I can only reconcile his politics with the fact that he lived in a much different era when systems of government were different and history had not left enough of an imprint on his soul.In any case, Saramago is true to Pessoa's political sense in Reis. Reis is also, to put it bluntly, quite a cad. He seems rather bogged down in classist structure, for instance, and though he is more than happy to have intimate relations with a chambermaid, he feels uncomfortable kissing her on the mouth as she is below him in class. Yeah, I wouldn't clean his floors or change his bedding either. Pessoa visits him and teases him about these relations, not only because of class but also because of the irony of the name of the chambermaid being the famous poetic Lydia. Reis is a doctor but even more so, he is a drifter, and he writes random poetry but it's hard to like someone so villainous in his personal issues and so erroneous in his political processes. My guess is that Saramago might even agree with me but given the importance of Pessoa and how this author affected Portugese writers after his time, it makes sense that he would proceed with the text and honor reality. In other words, the blame for our weakness of the protagonist's character lies not with Saramago but unfortunately with the honest version of history. Still, the fact that I disliked Reis and viewed his thoughts and behavior at times as that of a scoundrel is the ONLY reason this novel isn't receiving 5/5 stars from me. Otherwise, it is a work of brilliance and a very worthwhile read. Though the novel was written in 1986 with the obvious lens of learning from history, it is true that Saramago lived through this era himself. He was aged 13 when Pessoa died, in the year that the book was set. So one of the most interesting things about the book is how fascist the government is starting to get, how the Hitler youth are coming into Portugal and the Portuguese citizens area seeing zeppelins above them and how the Portugese government is even having staged practice attacks, which in and of itself seems absolutely surreal. This is the age when honorable citizens begin to look suspicious and where people are also talking about revolution. At the same time, the sick are taking pilgrimages to Fatima to cure them and there are still the common problems that many Portugese face in terms of lack of appropriate medical care, classism and poverty, and illiteracy that leads to hardships, gossip, and guesswork about international politics. Learning about what it was like to live in Portugal at this time is not something I've had the opportunity to do before. The perspective I've come across more is that of people living in America, Japan, Germany, Britain, or even France in comparison. However, it's interesting to see what was going through the hearts of minds of the citizens of every country during this crucial moment of history if we're going to ever understand how something like the Holocaust could have ever taken place and how to prevent it. Even more fascinating is, as ever, the way Saramago's lyrical writing style gives rise to such masterful philosophical musings. He is at his best in terms of these here and one can't help admire a man so adept at the act of writing itself and feel such a huge loss that he passed away from this world in 2010. One wonders if there is a ghost of Saramago lingering around the young authors of Portugal now, watching them drink coffee and asking them about what they read in the newspapers.Favorite quotes:pg. 8 "Climbing the front steps of the hotel, he realized from these musings that he was exhausted, that he was suffering from an overwhelming fatigue, an infinite weariness, a sense of despair, if we really know what despair means when we say that word."pg. 13 "innumerable people live within us. If I think and feel, I know not who is thinking and feeling, I am only the place where there is thinking and feeling...Who is using me in order to think and feel..."pg. 23 "When one awaits sleep in the silence of a room that is still unfamiliar, listening to the rain outside, things assume their real dimension, they all become great, solemn heavy. What is deceptive is the light of day, transforming life into a shadow that is barely perceptible. Night alone is lucid, sleep, however, overcomes it."pg. 25 "Since the time of Hamlet we have been going around saying, The rest is silence, in the end it's genius that takes care of the rest, and if this genius can do it, perhaps another genius can too."pg. 28 "In the distance he could hear the sound of a bell tolling, the sound he had expected to ear upon arrival, when he touched these railings, his soul gripped by panic, a deep laceration, an inner turmoil, like great cities collapsing in silence because we are not there, porticoes and white towers toppling...The great difference between poets and madmen is the destiny of the madness that possesses them."pg. 37 "It never occurs to people that the one who finishes something is never the one who started it, even if both have the same name, for the name is the only thing that remains constant."pg. 45-46 "It is rather like a castle made of cards, better for the upper part to be missing than to have the whole thin collapse and the four suits mixed up."pg. 47 "Stones have a long life. We do not witness their birth, nor will we see their death...Truly it is not enough to engrave a name on a stone."Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. Once language has said all it has to say and falls silent, I wonder how we will go on living. "pg. 49 "Silence descends on the city, every sound is muffled, Lisbon seems made of absorbent cotton, soaked, dripping."pg. 63 "In the end we are like small children, orphaned, because we cannot return to our dead mother, to the beginning, to the nothingness that was before beginning. It is before death and not after that we enter nothingness, for from nothingness we came, emerging, and when dead we shall disperse, without consciousness yet still existing."pg. 64 "Fernando Pessoa said for the time being it's allowed, I have eight months in which to wander around as I please. Why eight months, Ricardo Reis asked and Fernando Pessoa explained, the usual period is nine months, the same length of time we spend in our mother's womb, I believe it's a question of symmetry, before we are born no one can see us yet they think about us every day, after we are dead they cannot see us any longer and every day they go on forgetting us a little more, and apart from exceptional cases it takes nine months to achieve total oblivion"pg. 78 "Inside the body, too, there is profound darkness, yet the blood reaches the heart, the brain is sightless yet can see, it is deaf yet hears, it has no hands yet reaches out. Clearly man is trapped in his own labyrinth."pg. 106 "Sometimes a reply is not even spoken, trapped between one's teeth, one's lips, and if spoken, it remains inaudible, a tenuous yes or no that dissolves in the shadows of a hotel lounge like a drop of blood in a transparent sea, present but invisible."pg. 123 "I cannot explain or sum up myself in a single action or word, even if only to replace doubt with negation, shadows with darkness, a yes with a no, both having the same meaning, but worse than that, perhaps they are not even the words I spoke or the actions I performed, worse because irremediable, perhaps they are the things I never did, the words I never uttered, the one word or gesture which would have given meaning to what I was. If a dead man cat get so upset, death clearly does not bring peace. The only difference between life and death is that the living still have time, but the time to say that one word, to make that one gesture is running out for them. What gesture, what word, I don't know, a man dies from not having said it, from not having made it, that is what he dies of, not from sickness, and that is why, when dead, he finds it so difficult to accept death."pg. 160 "Were they to speak, they would say, I suddenly feel much better, may I go now. A foolish question, for as we all know the best remedy for a toothache is to walk through the door when the dentist calls."pg. 190 "Solitude weighs on him like the night and the night devours him like bait."pg. 193 "Death too is repetitive, it is in face the most repetitive thing of all."pg. 209 "Ricardo Reis sees her. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, she looks up , anxious to make sure that the person she seeks really lives here, and she is smiling, it is a smile that has a future, unlike those reflected in a mirror, that is the difference."pg. 273 "Ricardo Reis lets his eyes wander from face to face, they search but do not find, as if he were in a dream that has no meaning, like the dream of a road that goes nowhere, of a shadow cast by no object, of a word which the air had uttered and then denied."pg. 297-298 "These two old men have never been to sea, but their blood does not chill when they hear that mighty roar, mighty though muffled by distance, it is deeper down that they quake, as if there were ships sailing through the channels of their veins, ships lost in the darkness of their bodies, amidst the gigantic bones of the world."pg. 336 "He turns on his ivory colored Pilot radio. Perhaps the words we hear are more believable than the words we read, the only drawback is that we cannot see the announcer's face, because a look of hesitation, a sudden twitch of te mouth will betray a lie at once, let us hope that someday human inventiveness will make it possible for us, sitting in our own homes, to see the face of the announcer, then at last we will be able to tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and the era of justice will truly begin, and let us say, Amen."
The Choices of Ricardo ReisA LETTER TO WAH-MING CHANG Marcenda placed her right hand over her left. Both were cold, yet between the two was the difference between the quick and the dead, between what can still be salvaged and what is forever lost.Dear Wah-Ming --This letter, full of still-incomplete thoughts, comes to you because it was you who suggested Saramago's "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" to me, and you I've thought of often as I read the book. Perhaps that seems strange, because we've never met and hardly know each other, although I read your excellent essay on Saramago just after his own death at 87 earlier this year; perhaps he feels now like our mutual friend.The real reason is clear to me, though. If every reading of every book is unique, as I believe, then as I read this remarkable novel I kept wondering about your reading of it, because mine felt so particular, and so dependent on reading it at the age that I am, preoccupied with certain thoughts because of that age. You are, I think, in your thirties, while I am hurtling toward sixty. And while we both, as writers and readers, read this book -- I am quite sure -- breathless through Saramago's astounding sentences, wide-eyed at his minute but razor-sharp observations of place and personality, slack-jawed at his masterful construction of plot and narrative, and awed, in the aftermath, by the multiple layers of meaning that emerge -- I felt Ricardo Reis' cold hand on my shoulder as if I were a third party in the room, along with his visitor, the ghost of poet Fernando Pessoa, and I cannot imagine that you would have felt this; not yet.----My one quibble with the plot, actually, is that Saramago has his protagonist, the doctor and poet Ricardo Reis, come back to Portugal from Brazil at the age of 48, and ascribes feelings to him that I find more credible in a person ten years older - the age I am now. Of course, he had no choice: Reis' age had to be 48 because the book follows him for a year after the death of Pessoa, at 47; Pessoa, the inventor of 70-some heteronymns with distinct voices and personalities, of which one of the three main ones -- a melancholy flaneur and believer in fate rather than the possibility of happiness or choice -- was "Ricardo Reis." And so, because this is a magic realist novel, we have the living "Ricardo" returning to his native country after many years of self-imposed exile precisely because his author, Pessoa, has died, and Pessoa himself appearing, out of the graveyard with his pale face and impeccable black suit, to speak with Reis in the streets of Lisbon that Reis wanders, and in the hotel room where Reis conducts his affair with a chambermaid and longs, without real hope or decisive action, for the unreachable Marcenda, with her paralyzed hand.As I said, there are many ways this novel could be read, but for me, it is a book about the fatigue that comes at late middle age. I'm not talking about being jaded, because unless one has really been spoiled or profligate, one learns that there is always beauty to be seen and something new to be experienced. It's a fatigue that happens when one is old enough to look back and see that much of life is past, that death has become a companion, and that what looms ahead is a choice requiring, on the one hand, great force of will: to continue to engage, to create, to live as fully as possible, or to slow down or even give up, resigning oneself to waiting passively for the inevitable. I see this now in friends facing retirement, whose children are gone and on their own, weary in both body and spirit, convinced their best work and best years are behind them. And though I never anticipated finding it in myself -- because as an artist, writer, and thinker I have no intention of "retiring, " ever -- there are times when I am so exhausted by the world, by a worn body and mind that have seen and felt too much, and by reminders of death, an increasingly frequent visitor, that this choice becomes much more obvious and imperative.Saramago himself didn't achieve literary recognition until he was sixty, and wrote "Ricardo Reis" when he was 64; these ideas must have been very real to him or he couldn't have embodied them so convincingly in his characters: Reis, the doctor who refuses to heal; Marcenda whose hand "like a lifeless bird that she stroked in her lap" ceased to function after the death of her mother; the sleazy informer Victor, always announced by his leitmotif of onion breath; Lydia the chambermaid and her anarchist brother - the most vibrant characters in the book - who choose very different ways of seizing life with both hands. Saramago asks: what motivates action and what creates paralysis? What constitutes a miracle? What is a valuable life? What is the role of hope and how far are we willing to go to find it?So there is this possibility: a very personal reading. The story, like many other 20th century novels with a political setting, can also be read as a commentary on detached intellectualism. Or it can be read both as an account and an allegory about the choices faced by nations - by Portugal and Spain, sliding into Facism - or, by extension, perhaps even by nations in our own time. It would seem that this was at least part of the author's intention: in his Nobel lecture, Saramago remembered himself as an "apprentice" of 17, discovering the poems of "Ricardo Reis", and not realizing for a long while that this poet was actually Fernando Pessoa. He memorized many of Reis' "Odes," including the unforgettable and - is it deliberately provocative? - line "Wise is he who is satisfied with the spectacle of the world". Later, much later, the apprentice, already with grey hairs and a little wiser in his own wisdom, dared to write a novel to show this poet of the Odes something about the spectacle of the world of 1936, where he had placed him to live out his last few days: the occupation of the Rhineland by the Nazi army, Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, the creation by Salazar of the Portuguese Fascist militias. It was his way of telling him: "Here is the spectacle of the world, my poet of serene bitterness and elegant scepticism. Enjoy, behold, since to be sitting is your wisdom..."So here he was, well over sixty in 1988, turning his clear sad eyes at a world that had learned nothing since 1936. And what does he choose to do? In the very next paragraph of his Nobel lecture he tells us, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ended with the melancholy words: "Here, where the sea has ended and land awaits." So there would be no more discoveries by Portugal, fated to one infinite wait for futures not even imaginable; only the usual fado, the same old saudade and little more... Then the apprentice imagined that there still might be a way of sending the ships back to the water, for instance, by moving the land and setting that out to sea.And that became his next book, The Stone Raft.Wah-Ming, I hope you will tell me what the novel meant to you. I'm grateful to you and to Saramago that this book came along - as books sometimes do - at this precise point in my life, when I'm deliberately looking both backward and forward, considering the future and how much I may have a role in shaping it. One needs to see the alternative before, perhaps, believing that stone rafts can float.*Adamastor is a mythological character invented by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões. In an epic poem, he appeared in a threatening thundercloud to the explorer Vasco de Gama, who dared to pass the Cape and enter the Indian Ocean, which was Adamastor's realm. A statue of Adamastor stands over Lisbon's harbor, and is frequently mentioned as if he were a real person in the book.
What do You think about The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis (1998)?
Every time I read a book by Saramago I feel sad because he is no longer among us, to delight us with his writing, and that feels terrible. I felt this once more while reading this book, and I think I will feel it when I read the books I haven't read yet.Having said this, I had a wonderful time reading this book. Basically it tells what happens when Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, returns to Lisbon after sixteen years living in Brazil. There is a revolution in that country, Reis learns that Pessoa has died, and he makes up his mind to return to Portugal. And finds that many things have change, only in his country but also in Europe. In the first months, Reis lives in a hotel and starts an affairs with a chambermaid called Lídia. There, he also meets Marcenda, a young lady from Coimbra, who suffers a mysterious condition that has paralyzed her left arm. Reis is a medical doctor but in is first times in Lisbon he does not practice. Instead, he walks around the city, reads the papers, and he's visited by Fernando Pessoa, who, despite being dead, is capable of visiting Reis (he offers a very interesting theory on this).After leaving the hotel, Reis finds a house to live and he even finds a job as a substitute doctor. But most of his time is spent walking around and learning the news, both national and international, throught the reading of the newspapers. And thus, we now how the life went in the Portugal of the mid-thirties, and in the world.Another great book.
—Cat
تلك رواية من الروايات التي تشعر معها بالتناقض ، ربما تشعر بملل في مرحلة ما منها ولكنك لا تستطيع أن تتركها فلها طعم ما بروحك أو في رواسب الذاكرة تجعلك تحن بها إلى قديم كطعم الليالي الشتوية والوحدة الليلية مع مشروبك الساخن .ليديا وريكاردو ، في الوهلة الأولى تظن أن علاقتهما محض علاقة جنسية لكن بمرور الصفحات تجد علامات العلاقة بينهما تتضح وتتعقد أكثر ، علاقة هي رغبة في التواصل ، في وجود رفيق لك ويد تحنو عليك ، رغبة من ريكاردو في وجود رفيق له في غربة ضربت عليه في وطنه الذي انقطعت بينه وإياه الروابط ، ورغبة منها في الشعور بالاتصال بأحد يراها في وسط ذلك الزخم الكبير وهي المنسية بغرفات الفندق الضخم بالعاصمة الكبيرة التي تسحق روحها .مارسيندا وريكاردو ، العلاقة التي يراها ريكاردو مثالية ، ويطمح إليها في تطلع منه لمثل أعلى ممثل في تلك البريئة الجميلة صاحبة الاعاقة ، ربما هي شفقة منه عليها وهي النموذج الغير مكتمل للجمال .وروح فرناندو بسوا التي تلوح في الأفق لشخص شخصيته المتخيلة ريكاردو ريس في كل طاريء.ربما الرواية في حد ذاتها هي تحدي للعنة الزمن في النسيان ، هي تخليد لروح بسوا في شخص ريكاردو ريس ، تحدي لمقولة درويش : تنسى كأنك لم تكن ..."و أعتقد أنه نجح كثيرا في تحديها."أنشاص"
—أحمد نفادي
Non è mai facile per me raccontare ciò che Saramago è in grado di regalarmi e darmi, ma questa volta cercherò di valicare il confine delle emozioni e essere più razionale possibile per parlare di questo libro."Qui dove il mare è finito e la terra attende" si narra la storia di Ricardo Reis, uno degli eteronimi dietro cui si cela la figura di Fernando Pessoa. Saramago introduce la figura di Ricardo Reis presentandoci un medico-poeta che ha vissuto per ben 16 anni in Brasile e che giunge sulle coste del Portogallo scendendo dall'Highland Brigade, la nave che lo porta a casa. Una figura di carne e di sentimenti, di pensieri, di emozioni, di amore,che valica i confini del tempo per entrare nella storia, nel mito.E mentre il mondo continua a rotolare (vedi la guerra di Spagna), Ricardo Reis alias Fernando Pessoa è il faro che illumina, non solo il Portogallo, ma anche il mondo intero.
—Simona
