At the beginning of this year, I visited Lisbon for the first time, and thought I’d enhance the experience by reading some books set in Portugal’s capital. First, I read Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which is set in Lisbon in 1936 but whose titular protagonist is neither Saramago’s invention nor a historical figure. Ricardo Reis was one of several dozen “heteronyms” — literary alter-egos — dreamed up by Fernando Pessoa, the Lisboan writer who, little known when he died in 1935, is today celebrated as Portugal’s great modern poet (his tomb rests alongside those of Vasco de Gama and King Manuel I). The novel follows Reis through the final year of his life, during which he has a series of philosophically rich encounters… with the ghost of Fernando Pessoa.
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