El año de la muerte de Ricardo Reis

At the end of 1935, the year of Fernando Pessoa's death, an English ship, the Highland Brigade, arrived at the port of Lisbon, in which Ricardo Reis, one of the Portuguese poet's heteronyms, had traveled from Brazil. Throughout nine crucial months for Europe, during which the Spanish civil war breaks out and the Italian intervention in Abyssinia takes place, we witness the last stage of the life of Ricardo Reis, in dialogue with the spirit of Fernando Pessoa who comes to visit him from the cemetery at the most unexpected moments. It is the era of fountain pens, of Pilot radios, of the Hitler Youth, of the Topolinos, in an Atlantic and rainy Lisbon whose enveloping atmosphere becomes the true protagonist of this novel. The year of the death of Ricardo Reis is a lucid meditation on the meaning of an entire era. Saramago shows that Pessoa was wrong, that simple contemplation does not satisfy the lucid human being. Perhaps this disappointment leads Ricardo Reis to accompany Pessoa, leaving behind Lidia's love, an announced son, the duty to help the Portuguese soldiers who wanted to help the Spanish Republic, and the possibility of finishing an imaginary book by Borges that I was reading.