The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

In 1936 Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's poetic alter egos, returns from Brazil to Lisbon just after the poet's death, and drifts through the rainy city, visited by Pessoa's ghost, as fascism rises across Europe and Salazar's shadow deepens at home. Saramago maps a real Lisbon: the hotel where Reis lodges, the cemetery where he speaks with the dead Pessoa, the viewpoint over the Tagus, the river and its docks, and the watchful capital of the New State.

Ricardo Reis

The Hotel Bragança

The return

Off the ship from Brazil, Reis takes a room at the Hotel Bragança and begins his aimless Lisbon days, waited on by the chambermaid Lídia, who becomes his lover. Saramago settles his heteronym-made-flesh into the ordinary textures of the old city, the hotel corridors and rainy streets, from which the whole strange, contemplative novel unfolds.

The opening chapters

explicit Reis lodges at the Hotel Bragança near the Cais do Sodré on his return to Lisbon, a real establishment of the old lower city; sited there.

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