The book of disquiet

✍ Scribed by Fernando Pessoa

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Year: 2002;2018
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 315 KB
• Category: Fiction
• City: London
• ISBN: 1781258643

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Pessoa (1888-1935), identified by Barnard professor MacAdam as Portugal's major 20th-century writer, seems to have interpreted Whitman's statement "I contain multitudes" as an imperative; the gifted and perfectionist poet gave voice to a variety of selves, whom he named not with pseudonyms but with what he called heteronyms. The elegant volume here is the "diary" of "Bernardo Soares," presented as a bookkeeper, like Pessoa, who is obsessed with the role and aim of literature and tries, therefore, to become "like a character in a book, a read life." No plot orders the entries, nor is there any discernible progression. Instead, Pessoa speculates on the paradoxes of art ("Only when I'm disguised am I really myself"), at times mordantly ("To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut"), at times quixotically ("Writing is like the drug I despise but take, the vice I loathe but practice"), nearly always aphoristically. Readers with a particular interest in modernism will find this work indispensable.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Recognized as Portugal's greatest poet since Camoens, Pessoa (1888-1935) wrote poetry under various heteronyms to whom he attributed biographies different from his own. Likewise, this rich and rewarding notebook kept by the solitary, celibate, and semi-alcoholic Pessoa during the last two decades of his life, is written under yet another heteronym (Bernardo Soares), a Lisbon bookkeeper with a position that is like a siesta and a salary that allows him to go on living. Soares knows no pleasure like that of books, yet he reads little. Like Camus, he is irritated by the happiness of men who don't know they are wretched, and his main objective is to perceive tedium in such a way that it ceases to hurt. There are no gossipy details in this heteronymous memoir, only the cerebral workings of a first-rate thinker on the dilemma of life. Full of fresh metaphors and unique perceptions, The Book of Disquiet can be casually scanned and read profitably even at random.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.