SOURCE: "An Aftertaste of Iberian Unreality," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 30, 1990, p. 3.

[In the following review, Eder examines The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in the context of the Iberian literary tradition of surreality, finding in the novel an appropriate and successfully rendered balance between the serious and the absurd.]

The circumstantial fog that surrounds so many modern facts, the literary fog with which some modern authors choose to write about them, the actual fog that blurs and softens the Baroque architecture of Lisbon: How well, on the whole, these come together in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, author of the enchanting historical fantasy Baltasar and Blimunda, has created an utterly indeterminate protagonist. He is a middle-aged doctor and poet who returns to Lisbon in the mid-1930s after living for 16 years in Brazil. He dies...