The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

…morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), juxtaposes the romantic involvements of its narrator, a poet-physician who returns to Portugal at the start of the Salazar dictatorship, with long dialogues that examine human nature as revealed in Portuguese history and culture.

…morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis) is a masterful critique of fascism that ingeniously re-creates a character invented by Pessoa, while Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995; “Essay on Blindness”; Eng. trans. Blindness), one of the greatest allegories in 20th-century world literature, is a…