The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Harvest in Translation)

Welcome to Portugal circa 1935: a country in the grip of a Fascist dictatorship, a repressive police state marked by rigid class and sex barriers and a smothering, hypocritical public morality. Enter one Ricardo Reis, a returning Brazilian emigre, a middle-aged doctor without family ties, a dilettante poet haunted (literally) by the ghost of the recently deceased Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal's greatest poets. He carries on a perfunctory affair with a hotel chambermaid and manages to impregnate her, falls in love (too strong a description, but it will have to do) with an unsuitably younger woman with a paralyzed arm, and eventually his courage to live completely fails him. A bleak, depressing tale of personal and social sterility and vacuity. Well written, though. Saramago's distinctive take on the omniscient narrator adds some desperately needed zest and humor.