On reading Saramago’s Ricardo Reis
I’ve just finished reading “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” – a novel by José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s been a labour of love, a literary marathon – no less than 14 months have passed since I bought the book, but no matter how slow my progress (I read it in the original Portuguese), I was determined to finish with it. This is unusual, as I don’t always stick with books that are hard-going: Annie Proulx’ “Ace in the Hole” comes to mind. And yet, there’s something about Saramago’s intricate prose and demanding style that rewards and satisfies me as a reader. In sentences that are sometimes over a page long, there are grammatical constructions of intricate beauty to be unlocked and admired, Saramago playing with words and word order like a painter deftly using colour and composition. It is slow writing to be savoured, to be interacted with and – perhaps not only in my case – to be translated: the perfect antidote to the utilitarian prose employed by journalists or copywriters. For this aesthetic reason alone, “Ricardo Reis” is well worth the effort.
There’s more to it, of course: above all, the novel is a loving, detailed and fascinated portrait of life in a Europe already feverish with fascism and on the brink of the second world war. Details of everyday life are interspersed with news aper reports on world events: Mussolini’s barbarous assault on Abyssinia, Hitler’s illegal rearmament of the Rhineland and the Spanish civil are all reported on in the paper Ricardo Reis reads. Fascinating contemporary details emerge, long since forgotten. Who remembers that David Lloyd George – then an elder British statesman – called for Portugal to surrender some of its colonies to Hitler, in order appease the dictator?
There are also gripping descriptions of daily life: celebrations in working class neighbourhoods, lavish parties thrown by the rich to collect money in aid for the poverty-stricken victims of a recent flood, the rinky-dink circus of Catholic pilgrims besieging Fatima in hopes of a miracle, a political rally organised by the autocratic regime of Portugal’s dictator, Salazar – mimicking its Italian and German counterparts while also differing from it in crucial aspects (Salazar, a staunch Catholic, did not go along with the Nazis’ anti-semitism and racial ideology, which he found pagan – it was a passive resistance that nevertheless allowed many Jews to flee Europe via Lisbon).
Despite the apathy of the novel’s protagonist – a doctor returning to the country of his birth from Brazil, without a real plan but with enough money to support his indolence – the work is profoundly political. This is hardly surprising, as Saramago was a life-long communist (who, incidentally, distrusted the EEC, as it then was. What would he have made of Brexit?). And yet, Saramago is too sophisticated a writer to sermonise. Instead, he uses irony and satire to make his points – as well as one of his characters, a hotel maid whose Communist brother serves in the Portuguese navy. Patriotism, class structures, questions of war and peace, colonialism and the chilling effects of a dictatorship terrorising its own population by means of a secret police all loom large, interwoven into the narrative.
And yet, all this is merely a backdrop to the protagonist’s idle life. Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon after the death of his famous writer friend, Fernando Pessoa. In a touch of magic realism, Pessoa appears to Reis as a ghost, discussing love, literature and questions of life and death with his old friend. (Saramago never tells us that “Ricardo Reis” is a pen-name of Pessoa’s invention: effectively his alter ego. In this sense, Reis and Pessoa are two manifestations of one and the same person.) Meanwhile in the real world, Reis falls for a young but ultimately unattainable lady of social standing while ignoring the very real, earthy love of Lidia, a maid in his hotel: blinded by class prejudice, happiness evades him. Similarly crippled as a writer who specialises in affected odes, Reis’ life approaches its ending – the quiet petering out of a strangely meaningless – and yet compelling – existence.