The Book of Disquiet (Extraordinary Classics) [Paperback]

Fernando Pessoa (Author), Maria José de Lancastre (Editor), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Extraordinary Classics | Publication Date: March 1992

The first English-language translation of Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa's only novel. It takes the form of the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, a Lisbon clerk.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A better title might be The Books of Disquiet . Each entry in this fictional diary of one Bernardo Soares represents an attempt to create a distinct biography, for Soares lives according to the maxim: "Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul." Through every rumination he records Soares longs to father someone because he is "nobody, absolutely nobody." His monotonous work as a bookkeeper in a Lisbon office and his solitary, celibate existence have contributed to the dissolution of his identity. Yet this grants him the ultimate imaginative freedom: "Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything." One effect of this freedom is a sense of exhaustion before the sheer number of possibilities for being. Another is a sense--at once paternal and disturbingly erotic--of intimacy with the whole human race. Of sleep Soares muses: "When someone sleeps they become a child. . . . I experience an immense, boundless tenderness for all of infantile humanity." More elegantly translated here than in the recent Pantheon edition, this novel presents paradoxes of identity that are more than just an occasion for meditation for Pessoa (1888-1935), one of Portugal's greatest writers and among this century's most enigmatic. They parallel Pessoa's own lived experience. He created several distinct personalities--called "heteronyms"--through which he wrote in an astonishing variety of styles and even in different languages. Soares represents a "semiheteronym," perhaps closest of all to the "real" Pessoa. Whoever Pessoa was, he managed to address through Soares's abstruse, at times excruciatingly precious musings the essential condition of human identity as represented in Western literature. Soares's separation from a common order might be the stuff of tragedy but for the fact that "my self-imposed rupture with any contact with things, led me precisely to what I was trying to flee." For all his quixotic tilting at windmills, Soares admits: "Whenever I see the figure of a young girl in the street . . . I wonder, however idly, how it would be if she were mine." Yet Sancho Panza's suit never hangs on Soares's skinny bones, and this is his dilemma. He is stalled between the poles of tragedy and comedy: "I can be neither nothing nor everything: I'm just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want." And herein lies the reason for the multifarious forms of his--and our--disquiet.
Copyright 1992 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 262 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (March 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852422041
• ISBN-13: 978-1852422042
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,863,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully fine and unique book, December 21, 1999

By 

"cjtloe" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book Of Disquiet (Paperback)

Pessoa was a true acrobat of the imagination. The Book of Disquiet is a collection of epiphanic journal or diary prose kept by Pessoa and found decades after his death. The prose is truly some of the most gorgeous musings about everyday life and existence that any reader could ever find. The poet's world is laid out exquisitly and paradoxically for the entire benefit of those who read.I can't say I've ever found such beauty in the pages of a book before. If you like literature albeit simple or complex this book is something that you will immediately cherish for a very long time.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thinking is absurd, December 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Book Of Disquiet (Paperback)

"If i think, it all seems absurd to me; if i feel, it all seems strange; if i desire, he who desires is something inside of me."
Sums up the book perfectly. Pessoa explores one of his many personalities. "The Book of Disquiet" explains, in complete depth and faith, the beauty of a lonely, existential, moment by moment life. He explains the beauty that people forget. He explains the world, his perception, as if every moment were the last.
"The book of disquiet" is one of the most insightful books a person can read, but only if one has imagination and an ability to let go. Bernardo Soars, Pessoa's personality who wrote the book, is extreme and eccentric. It isn't easy reading, and it won't affect you if you can't overlook the fact that life doesn't go on like Soars'; that there is more in thinking, dreaming, and desiring than Soars admits. What makes the book so special is how Soars can forget everything but the thought and the moment, and how he can analyze and critique and put into words something that most of us forget to remember. "The book of disquiet" reminds me, at least, of how to appreciate my own mind. It is the only philosophy-like book that i enjoy (as yet) because it is the real thing and encompasses a forgotten part of real life.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great, neglected writer, September 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Book Of Disquiet (Paperback)

I first read of Pessoa in Geoff Dyer's biography of Lawrence. The Book Of Disquiet is genuinely original. In it Pessoa expounds his notion that a human being consists of several sensibilities irreconcilable with one another. For each of the individuals comprising Pessoa, Pessoa coins an appropriate (though not epithetic) "heteronym," of which there are more than a few. Pessoa regards the notion of a coherent personality--rather than a committee of warring selves--as an invitation to ignore any experience that does not easily consist with our notion of own characters, and thus an invitation both to dishonesty and to the rejection of experience. In this he is very close to the Buddhist notion that the Self is a fictional solidification of that which is eternally in flux. Pessoa has an uncanny intimacy with his own self and a very deep and moving commitment to the experience of being himself. This is a remarkable, deep, wise book.