Style
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is written in Saramago's distinctive style, in which he uses no punctuation except commas and periods, denoting dialogue and changes of speaker using only capital letters. He uses long, flowing sentences and paragraphs often several pages in length. Saramago also digresses from the story frequently, occasionally even in the first person, remarking philosophically on the significance of images, objects or situations encountered in the story. Saramago’s writing technique often has strong magical-realist elements.
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“Everything ponderous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long- winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among Germans—forgive me the fact that even Goethe’s prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, being a reflection of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and a reflection of German taste at a time when there still was a “German taste”Ma rococo taste in moribus et artibus.”
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