Description
By (author) SARAMAGO; By (author) Saramago, José
Short /annotation:
The world”s threats are universal like the sun but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow.
Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis wanders the rain-sodden streets. His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier.
:
The world”s threats are universal like the sun but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow.
Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis wanders the rain-sodden streets. He longs for the unattainably aristocratic Marcenda, but it is Lydia, the hotel chamber maid who makes and shares his bed. His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier. It is 1936, the clouds of Fascism are gathering ominously above them, so they talk; a wonderful, rambling discourse on art, truth, poetry, philosophy, destiny and love.
Review quote:
The greatest of his novels
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Lovely…a work of fluent and amazing gracefulness
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A capacious, funny, threatening novel
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He has created a body of work of luminous power: ironic, intellectually playful, dense and strange
Review quote:
Shows Saramago to be a novelist of the grandest sort…it is a dramatic work of great philosophical weight, filtered through a refined contemplative intelligence
Biographical note:
José Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the
last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.
Promotional headline:
A unique, meditative, funny, politically astute masterpiece by one of Europe”s greatest writers
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