Das Todesjahr des Ricardo Reis

A wonderful homage to one of the most significant poets of Portugal: Fernando Pessoa. The character Ricardo Reis, the alter ego of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, encounters his creator in a hotel in Lisbon. With imagination, political insight, and stylistic brilliance, Saramago crafts an imaginary life and transforms it into a masterful literary puzzle. When the doctor Ricardo Reis learns in 1935 that Fernando Pessoa has died, he returns from Brazil to his hometown of Lisbon. Without concrete plans, he checks into a hotel, strolls through Lisbon, reads in newspapers about Hitler's power ambitions and the looming Spanish Civil War, and begins two affairs: an erotic one with the maid Lídia and a platonic one with the paralyzed Marcenda. Then, one day, the supposedly dead Pessoa unexpectedly appears in his hotel.