The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Recently Jose Saramago threw me for a bit of a loop when I read one of his novels and it turned out to be one giant reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, a story I was at the time completely unfamiliar with. I still enjoyed Saramago's The Cave quite a bit, but knowledge of this bit of meta-commentary seems like it would have helped my understanding of the book as I was reading it. Unfortunately, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was so heavily loaded with similar meta-references that I was pretty much hopeless and couldn't enjoy that book nearly as much as The Cave. The Year of the Death starts out well enough- I actually was liking it plenty for the first 3/5 or so- a simple drama about a man  (the titular Ricardo Reis) who returns to a pre-WWII Portugal from post-revolution Brazil and attempts to start up some romance with a few women and catch up with an old friend named Fernando who might not be alive. The big problem here is that it turns out the potentially dead friend was actually a real person in history- Fernando Pessoa was a real author who actually existed, and not only that, but Ricardo Reis was the 'character'- created by Fernando in the first place! Saramago was writing a 'sequel' to some other guy's wacky ideas- so meta! Not only that, but throughout the novel Ricardo Reis periodically reads through sections of a book called 'The God of the Labyrinth' by fictional author Herbert Quain. You better believe this is meta- as all fuck too. Yes, that fictional book and fictional author are really references to very real author Jorge Luis Borges, a guy I've been meaning to get to reading at some point. Borges made up Herbert Quain and that novel, so Saramago tosses the fake book and author into his story about fictional/nonfictional authors who may or may not be dead. Wow! It's surprising that most of the book is actually pretty straightforward. But while some research beforehand may have helped my understanding (I'll probably give the rest of Saramago's books a cursory Wikipedia check from now on), I doubt it would have made me like the book that much better- as I said before, I actually liked The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis for a bit past its first half, but it turned into a slog of historical fiction towards the end as I just ended up wanting Ricardo to hurry up and die already. Sure, the final scene ended things on a nice note, but I was ready for Ricardo Reis to be done. Three more Saramago novels (and one surprise novella!) remain in the backlog.