The Year of Ricardo Reis’s Death

Description

Due to the density of this novel, stemming partly from its historical and cultural references to Portugal in its particularity, and also from the interplay between the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion that forms its fabric, the fundamental dimension of this novel—the ambiguity surrounding the double—opens it up to the fluidity inherent in the boundaries of identities. This is indeed suggested by the three published epigraphs. When the journey of Ricardo Reis, as an alternate name for Pessoa, ends, the journey of José Saramago’s character begins. As if echoing Pessoa’s statement, “I am a character in a novel that still needs to be written,” Saramago, after establishing the historical, topographical, and political constants of his novel, fabricates the encounter between these two non-existences: the existence of the dead poet and the existence of his illusory, dual double.