Il 30 novembre del 1935 morirono, nello stesso giorno, cinque fra i migliori scrittori portoghesi. Con la scomparsa di Fernando Pessoa non venne infatti solo a mancare la sua figura, ma anche quella dei suoi quattro "eteronimi", ovvero i quattro nomi d'arte che, in alternativa al suo, Pessoa utilizzò per firmare alcune delle sue principali opere letterarie: Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares e Ricardo Reis.

È proprio quest'ultimo che cinquant'anni dopo viene ripreso da José Saramago per "L'anno della morte di Ricardo Reis": lo scrittore portoghese omaggia il letterato più conosciuto del suo Paese rendendo protagonista del romanzo quel suo eteronimo, Ricardo Reis, portoghese emigrato in Brasile e rappresentante il lato più classico della letteratura occidentale. Nella storia di Saramago sarà lui, unico fra gli eteronimi a non avere una data di morte, a tornare a Lisbona all'indomani della scomparsa di Pessoa. In una Europa oramai prossima alla seconda guerra mondiale, lentamente cercherà di riprendere la normalità di una vita che oramai pensava di essersi lasciato alle spalle, percorrendo i suoi ultimi mesi di vita fra incontri con lo spirito di Pessoa e avvenimenti ben più terreni, come l'amore diviso fra una povera cameriera e una giovanissima ragazza malata. A far da contorno è però la guerra, sempre più incalzante, tanto che sarà essa a prendere negli ultimi capitoli la scena, abbandonando al nostro eteronimo uno spazio sempre più marginale.

Il libro di Saramago è, appunto, un omaggio a Pessoa, e come tale va affrontato. Per chi Pessoa non lo conoscesse, "L'anno della morte di Ricardo Reis" risulterà un libro quasi indigesto e incomprensibile. La lentezza della narrazione e lo stile sembrano anch'essi ricalcare certi libri di Pessoa: "L'anno della morte..." è un libro principalmente "contemplativo", con diverse digressioni filosofico-letterarie, e non la storia avvincente che qualcuno si potrebbe aspettare. Anche il lungo finale, dove protagonisti sono i cambiamenti nella scena europea prossima all'arrivo del nazifascismo, riporta all'opera di Pessoa e a quanto l'autore, scomparendo quattro anni prima dello scoppio della guerra, ha lasciato con le sue opere letterarie. Saramago purtroppo non riesce a sostenere tutto il peso di un omaggio del genere: alcune immagini in questo libro rimangono vivamente impresse nel lettore, ma non è stato facile, almeno per me, leggerlo tutto di seguito, proprio per la pesantezza di alcune parti e per una trama che sembra spesso immobile, incapace di evolversi insieme al personaggio. Sono tre stelle e mezza, ma potrebbero diventare quattro a una lettura più coscienziosa.

Saramago novels are always worth reading, but this one perhaps less so than works like "Seeing" and "Blindness." The premise is an interesting one. Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, has just died. Shortly thereafter, one of the fictitious persons under whose name he wrote poetry, Richard Reis, returns to Lisbon from Brazil where he has lived for sixteen years. He meets Pessoa, now a sort of revenant, who tells him that the dead have nine months to return from the grave from time to time before ultimately perishing--a sort of balance to the nine months we spend in our mother's womb. The reader will no doubt surmise soon after beginning the novel that Reis, who is really just a creation of Pessoa, will also perish with his master (no spoiler alert for such an easily guessed outcome that is, moreover,announced in the title). The novel follows Reis' life, loves, and encounters with Pessoa during this brief period of time. All of this is set against the backdrop of the first months of 1936, when fascism is on the rise in Portugal and throughout Europe, political events that will eventually entangle Reis. It is a complex novel in which Saramago is juggling so many themes and issues, that I think he difficulty deciding how to keep them all in play. I found the ultimate outcome of the political theme, for example, somewhat unsatisfying, although other readers may strongly disagree. Also, Saramago's unique narrative style, which is so startling and appealing for a few novels, begins to get a bit tedious and even predictable. Saramago is a very important novelist who deserved the Nobel Prize he won in 1998, but I need a long vacation from his novels so I can rediscover the sense of freshness and excitement I once felt in his writing. Finally, I should add, that I read much of this novel while in Lisbon, the perfect setting in which to enjoy both Saramago and the great poet Pessoa. I was inclined to give this novel three stars, but the reverberations between the novel and Lisbon itself earned it, for this reader, the fourth star!

All we can ask of a character is that they inhabit the earth for a time, whether that is the time we read about them, or the times in which they exist on the page. A character is a fiction, the work is a fiction. Yet they can travel through real time and place, and use real words on a page, make us walk side by side with them as real (or at least plausible), force real thoughts and emotions out of us. Living in strange times (all times are strange, though some are worse for more protagonists than others) turns fiction into a universe that makes more sense than the world did before we read it. Saramago was aware of this when he set this in the 1930s.

What a strange time to be placed in as a character, alive during a dictatorship, when nothing makes sense, everything uttered by the state is a fiction, an exaggeration, a corporate cliche. Well, fortunately for Dr Ricardo Reis he doesn't exist, he is a creation of the poet Fernando Pessoa who died just a few months before Reis returns from Brazil after 16 years absence. Reis doesn't exist, but we do. So we are left to process this half-life during dictatorship. It shouldn't make sense that a fictional character talks to a real author during the time immediately after his death. And yet what better way do we have to understand the universe created by dictatorships?

Nothing is stable. Reis lives in a half-way place, a hotel, for three months. There, everything is taken care of: bed, meals, warmth, polite conversation with manager and staff, and the chambermaid Lydia becomes his mistress. Lydia is real, in the sense that Pessoa did not invent her. The weather - it rains all day, that is real, as is the cold and facts Reis reads in the newspapers, the republic in Spain and the military coup, these are all real. Fernando Pessoa, Reis' creator, shows up one night and the two men talk, creator to heteronym. A heteronym for Pessoa's purposes was something like an alter ego but also a pseudonym of sorts. Pessoa had several and they all wrote poetry or prose- Dr Reis wrote classical lyrical works for instance. I looked it up and 'heteronym' means a word spelled the same but has two different meanings. Ideal, since Pessoa was only dealing with words on the page.

Reis has little or no purpose and no real plans. When it gets too difficult in the hotel, after an influx of new Spanish guests, right wing refugees from the republic - all obnoxious self important and fatuous, Reis takes an apartment. He lives off English currency and has savings still in Brazil. Lydia keeps coming and going, cleaning the apartment, pretending she is in a relationship. But Reis also fantasises about the elegant and young Marcenda, who has a crippled hand. Reis becomes a locum doctor, filling in for a cardiologist. Another indication that he doesn't actually exist - he works without proper experience and qualification as a cardiologist. But he muddles through. Fiction is like that.

The crisis in Spain spills over to Portugal. The rhetoric of dictators like Salazar is real, even if it is nonsense, enough people believe it all, like they believe in the miracles of Fatima and go there on pilgrimage in droves.

Pessoa turns up at any and all hours. He is bound by some death ritual to travel the world for nine months after his death. But he cannot read in the real world so Reis informs him of goings on. They have philosophical discussions after which Pessoa disappears. We never know when he might return.

"A word lies. With the same word, one can speak the truth. We are not what we say, we are true only if others believe us." Says Reis.

In other words, fiction can be as powerful as reality. Dr Reis exists because Pessoa invented him and Saramago writes a convincing novel about him. A plausible story, the same as the plausible ideas in the speeches of Salazar the dictator on the modern greatness of Portugal, or as Saramago reminds us in the words of Unamuno: the fascists are protecting western civilisation. Of course they are.

Pessoa wrote in the Book of Disquiet:

"Everything we do in art or in life is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing"

And so Reis is the imperfect creature on the page, indecisive, shallow - he pines for one woman, yet happily sleeps with another - flops around without much of a plan, vain and neurotic - he worries about what time to go down to dinner and what the hotel manager thinks of him. Perhaps that makes him the perfect creature of a writer's imagination. At least in art we can appreciate failures and imprecise representations. Reis is the perfect creature to arise out of Pessoa's brain, the antidote to the perfectible human - the good Portuguese, like the great Aryan - that other ideal national hero doing the rounds during the 1930s. Failure is of greater value to Pessoa than the sham of perfection.

Saramago is meticulous in trawling through the daily history of 1936. A big year for Portugal, Spain, the world. Fascism was on the rise. It seemed like the only reality and many were falling over themselves to be part of it. Not just the dictators like Salazar, but we are reminded too that so was Chamberlain. And that great philanthropist, Rockefeller was funding Franco, and the abdicated king of England was dancing cheek to cheek with Adolf. Fascism seemed like such a good idea. The world was on a knife-edge between the real and the fictional. Fascist fiction is also very real unfortunately.

And that's the problem when we listen to the bullshit of corporations and narcissist presidents. It all seems so real for a time. Thankfully we have literature, and make believe, to tell us the difference between bullshit and real.

Addit. I dipped into Pessoa's extraordinary guide to a life - The Book of Disquiet - after reading this. Saramago drew on Pessoa's persona closely for both Reis, Pessoa and the themes of his novel:

"I existed only so much as I filled time with consciousness and thought"

"It's so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don't know what human words could define it."