José Saramago

Ricardo Reis is one of the many names under which Fernando Pessoa, the greatest Portuguese writer of the twentieth century, signed his works. The author imagines that a Ricardo Reis, after sixteen years spent in Brazil, returns to Lisbon in the very year of Pessoa’s death, 1935. It is pointless to seek a plot in the novel; as in Joyce’s *Ulysses*, the real subject of the narrative is the wanderings through 1930s Lisbon and the succession of thoughts on reality and on oneself: thoughts that never find an adequate expression in words. > Over the stark nudity of truth the diaphanous cloak of fantasy, the maxim seems clear, clear, neat and definitive, even a child will be capable of understanding it and repeating it in an exam without making a mistake, but this same child would understand and repeat with equal conviction a new sentence, Over the stark nudity of fantasy the diaphanous cloak of truth, and this sentence, yes, gives far more food for thought, and to imagine with relish, fantasy solid and nude, truth barely diaphanous, if overturned maxims became laws, what a world we would make of them, it is a miracle that men do not go mad every time they open their mouths to speak . In this deft literary inversion through which the certainty of reality turns into vagueness and imagination gains the upper hand, the novel’s fundamental theme is revealed: it is no longer possible to “read” the world, the interior one any more than the external context. Ricardo Reis walks through Lisbon as though in a labyrinth, unable to find an exit. He is partly “a spectator of the spectacle of the world” and partly overwhelmed by his own thoughts: it is not he > who is thinking these thoughts, nor one of those innumerable selves living inside him, perhaps it is thought itself that is thinking, or simply thinking, while he watches, surprised at the unravelling of a thread leading him through unknown streets and corridors... But is it Ricardo Reis who is confused, or is it reality itself that becomes representation rather than truth? The book’s most compelling pages concern the protagonist’s journey to Fátima and the description of a sort of war simulation staged by Salazar’s dictatorial regime: an urge to partake in the great slaughter of the 1930s (the Spanish Civil War and subsequently the world conflict). Faced with the shameless exploitation of hopes for a cure, with the petty and grand commerce surrounding the shrine, religion turns into superstition, an occasion for revelry, a contempt for spirituality. In the same way, the military parades, the celebrations of victories that never occurred, the false reports, the propaganda are the unsettling parody of a moral and physical disaster looming over Europe. The protagonist seeks, without much conviction, solid anchors for his life, both inner and political, but it is all in vain: > time drags on like a slow, viscous wave, a paste of liquid glass on whose surface lie myriads of sparkles that catch the eye and deflect meaning, while deep down the tawny and unsettling core shows through, an engine in motion (...) Ricardo Reis lacks a guide dog, a walking stick, a light ahead, for this world and this Lisbon are a dark fog where north and south, east and west are lost, where the only open path leads downward, and if a man lets himself go he plunges straight down, a dummy with neither legs nor head . It is hardly surprising, then, that when Pessoa’s ghost visits the protagonist, Ricardo Reis decides to follow him into the world of the dead, where reading is the first faculty to be lost. “Here (in Lisbon), where the sea has ended and the earth awaits.” Many interpretations can be offered for the novel: the narration of a progression toward death; the desire to evoke a Lisbon now vanished; the contrast between a yearned-for and idealized love (the figure of Marcenda, a notary’s daughter) and a sensual and concrete love (the liaison with the chambermaid Lídia); the subtle irony aimed at Portuguese society; and yet further meanings. The unifying thread of so many explanations is the shattering of the European conscience, aware and terrified yet inert and cowardly before the disaster toward which it moves, as though dragged along by an indecipherable and unstoppable fate. > We have all had a father and a mother, but we are children of chance and necessity, whatever this phrase may mean, Ricardo Reis thought it, let him clarify it . In reading the novel, one encounters sentences that are exceptional from a literary standpoint. One cannot help but feel envious, and captivated, by the following passage. > Only a vague inconsequential sorrow lingers a while at the door of my soul and after gazing at me for a moment passes on, smiling at nothing, he murmured (Ricardo Reis). Yet on the whole, the narrative style is cumbersome and tedious. The phrasing is complex, with frequent shifts of subject; the sentences are long, dominated by commas; the punctuation does not aid the reader; reflections, often philosophical in nature, prevail over plot, characters, and descriptions. There is a total absence of dialogue, which might otherwise lend breath and vitality to the narration. It is a *Ulysses* in which there is no Mr Bloom. Why not read it? It is tedious and prolix.