Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

or how we modern readers accept many artificial conventions of the modern novel in a mindless way — you might say Zombie fashion. (There, I got the zombie tie-in. hah!)

I was turned on to this book via James Wood’s “How Fiction Works.” Wood cites Saramago,who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, as a unique stylist.

That he is. I learned from Wood that the way we expect novelists to handle dialog . . .
(”I love you,” she said.
“I’ve heard those words before,” he said. “Show me.” )

… was the invention of Gustav Flaubert. In the 19th Century, it was innovative, but is a long way from realism.

In Saramago’s novel, we follow Ricardo Reis through the last year of his ‘life.’ I put ‘life’ in quotation marks, because we soon learn Reis is one of the personae of a real-life Portuguese poet. In this way, we are constantly reminded, perhaps in the same way as we are in some new wave cinema, that we are reading a work of fiction. As a result, one (at least I did) teeters on the edge of being emotionally absorbed by Reis’ struggle in 1936 fascist Portugal and intellectually unraveling the portent of his life. I know this sounds a bit obscure, but trust me it works.

Along the way, the reader has to give up the comfort of tradition dialogue. The dialog and exchanges between characters should be run-on and lose one, as their is not a single ,” he said. Or ,”she said, that I can find in the whole novel. But such is Saramago’s power of writing, that even without such punctuation clues, I always knew who was saying what.

Here’s an example, and the quotation marks are mine, not Saramago’s:

“Ricardo Reis is engrossed in these thoughts, some of them perhaps too difficult to unravel for anyone who like ourselves is on the outside, but Ramon, who sees much, inquires, Do you wish anything else, Doctor, a tactful way of saying, thought expecting the negative, that the doctor does. We are apt at understanding that sometimes half a word suffices. Ricardo Reis rises to his feet, says Goodnight to Ramon, wishes him a Happy New Year, and ….”

Maybe that gives you an idea. If you read novels for non-stop action or lots of sex, this book is not for you. Ricardo Reis and the world Saramago builds around him are both complex and compellingly human.

If you want a new way a looking at how an author builds such characters and worlds, then you might find this book interesting.

Both Wood’s book and Saramago’s are required reading for any novelist wishing to improve his or her craft, IMHO.

Robert Burns
http://unselfishgene.com
and
http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?b…





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