Customer Reviews

The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is amazing. I had never heard of Pessoa before I spied the book at Shakespeare & Co here in Paris, read the attached reviews and thought it must be worth the 10 Euros to see what I was missing.

Pessoa is unlike any other writer you will ever read. The closest match to this book that I can think of is Augustine's Confessions, albeit a more lovely written, more moving, post-modernist, secular version of that classic. It is existential philosophy, literary theory, diary, poetry, dream journal and confession all wrapped into one. A profound and profoundly moving book which will leave you wondering why such an incredible writer and thinker remains so obscure. The book is written in snatches, better to be dipped into at leisure than read straight thru. You'll find yourself annotating passages, writing down qoutes, rereading sections endlessly. You'll begin to question the reality of your existence, if not your own sanity, if you read it too thoroughly.

This is truly Art of the highest order and should be read by every thinking person. I'd give it 6 stars if I could.

It's quite difficult to describe this book; it's not about anything in particular. But if you have ever pondered the split seconds of mental webs strung in between your actual thoughts; if you have ever felt the presence of a question that threatens to disrupt your ability to function unless you write it down; if you have ever played with words and wondered if and how those words relate to what is real--then you must read Pessoa. One of the most compelling, fascinating, overwhelming things I have read. It will surely change you.

I picked up this book based on the recommendation from British pop icon, Morrissey. Previously, I had never heard of Pessoa. Morrissey commented in a magazine that once you start reading this book, you won't put it down. And he was right!

Let me first say this book is astonishing in every way. Written in a prose/poetry/diary format, the images and landscapes invade your imagination and stay with you. With imagary such as: "To drag my feet homeward weighs like lead on my senses. The caress of extinction, the flower proffered by futility, my name never pronounced, my disquiet like a river contained between the banks, the privilege of abandoned duties, and - around the last bend in the ancestral park - that other century, like a rose garden." (page 391)

At times, it reads like a beautiful suicide note. But just when you think he's ready to do himself in, he says: "In certain particularly lucid moments of contemplation, like those of early afternoon when I observantly wander through the streets, each person brings me a novelty, each building teaches me something new, each placard has a message for me." (page 297)

I would say that Pessoa was the greatest writer to never publish. And the greatest of poet-philosophers to never exist. His place in history is long overdue. He should stand with the likes Baudelaire and Goethe and tower over most 20th century authors.

In summary, Pessoa has invented a new language for the forgotten, the alienated, the damned, the dispossessed, the "disquieted". The "Book of Disquiet" is the greatest masterpiece never finished. Read it with caution. You may find yourself in love with words again.

It's not a book based on plot or persuasion; merely a book which presents incredible feelings and ideas in a fantastic way. Often we have all wondered about the true nature of simply BEING. Often we feel as though the world passes us by, or hunts us, or seeks to confuse us. Pessoa simply puts these feelings into beautifully flowing prose. Complex ideas and feelings are written of so skillfully that I feel as if we had been the same person. This book is well worth reading.

At times some of it feels almost banal. It probably is. But some of it is simply more beautiful than anything i ever read. There is no plot and i like to read no more than a page a day. A recurring feeling of tiredness, a sense of no purpose in life, of immeasurable melancholy, but foremost a sense of being lost, alone, in a world one is not really part of, but can neither part from, is what informs Pessoa. It's probably not possible to express feelings like that in words, it certainly isn't possible to rationalize them, but never has anyone failed more beautifully at attempting than Pessoa.

Its hard to describe this book. Amazing, beautiful, depressing, enlightening, pleasurable, magnificent, etc. One could go on. I found this book randomly on the shelf and could barely wait to read it all. I think its best read this slowly, as there is a lot to take it and ponder. Sometimes one needs to stop after reading just one phrase or idea; as its too much to take it at once. His choice of words are outstanding, as are his descriptions of Portugal and life in general. An outstanding book. I'm not sure why its not more popular and required reading in university. A must read.

*The Book of Disquiet* is one of those great books that isn't for the great majority of people. Basically a collection of fragments written over the good part of a lifetime and attributed to one of Pessoa's literary alter-egos Bernardo Soares, *Disquiet* was assembled and translated by editor Richard Zenith from a legendary trunkful of unpublished texts discovered after Pessoa's death.

These semi-autobiographical reflections are dominated by an all-pervading world-weariness and negation of ordinary life--a book of disgust, as it were--saved from out and out nihilism only by a sort of idealistic solipsism--a perverse counter-celebration of dream, inertia, solitude, impotence, and failure. From this unlikely recipe, Pessoa manages to distill a formula for taking a morbidly decadent pleasure from a total rejection of the bleak facts of human existence just this side of suicide!

The short texts that make up *The Book of Disquiet* range from philosophical speculations to surrealistic prose poems, from misanthropic diatribes worthy of Dostoyevsky's "underground man," to daily diary entries that reflect on a wide-range of everyday subjects. The result is an exhaustive if uneven and often repetitive text, although through no fault of Pessoa's inasmuch as putting together a finished book from these fragments was a project that eluded him in his shortened life. As an editor, what Zenith has done here--for better and for worse--is give us a text almost scholarly in its completeness. As such, there is a great deal of redundancy in this edition of *Disquiet.* It's hard to imagine that Pessoa wouldn't have cut and shaped a finished version differently. The fact that he didn't, however, is not only a consequence of his short life, but of his own documented indecision of just how to proceed with the task.

And yet, as Zenith convincingly points out in his introduction, the very "messiness" of *Disquiet* is part of its charm; it's unfinished and indeterminate nature is a perfect realization of Pessoa's message--a reflection in prose form of the man and his beliefs. While many readers--and occasionally I was one of them--might wish for an abridged and "cleaned-up" version of *Disquiet* it's ultimately hard to complain about what, in the end, is nothing more egregious than too much of a good thing.

Certainly one of the more unique texts in world literature, *The Book of Disquiet* is a daring assertion of the meaninglessness of life and an unorthodox response to despair through a radical withdrawal from life into an interior realm of the literary imagination.

I wouldn't advise dipping into this book if you're feeling happy---it's sure to knock you off your cloud. I would also advise against reading it if you're feeling melancholy---it will plunge you into the pits of despair. Only if you're feeling a nameless oppression and to wish to see your existential condition examined from a beautifully written literary perspective, would I suggest these musings of Bernardo Soares.

You can safely approach this work if you do so with the curious equanimity of an anthropologist visiting the country called Inertia for the first time---the dreariness is so extreme that it's fascinating as a field study, but fortunately for you, you can pack up and leave at any time. Poor Fernando Pessoa couldn't leave, and had to invent the remarkable persona of Bernardo Soares to express the anguished monotony of his days. Bernardo is an accountant, a loner, and bored out of his mind. Nothing happens in his external life, but his internal universe is complex, rich, and full of extraordinary insight. He is a "...a prose writer who poeticizes, a dreamer who thinks, a mystic who doesn't believe..." according to Richard Zenith, the competent translator. When you sit with Bernardo in stunned exhaustion as he labors long and uselessly to express his thousand forms of angst, you realize: nowhere else will you find the torment and tediousness of mundane existence so tenderly articulated. Bernardo goes about this with the determined insistence of a somnambulist. Pessoa has said that Bernardo was the heteronym that he used where he was drowsy, and Bernardo is indeed given to uninhibited and endless reverie.

At 450 pages of small print, it is a unique form of self-punishment to read more than twenty pages at one sitting. It can also be some of the most rewarding reading you will ever do. The journal-like entries are numbered, so it's easy to pick up where you left off if you want to read in increments. It's also good to read this in conjunction with one of Pessoa's volumes of poetry, where the other heteronyms offer rational and emotional relief, rounding out the work of this astonishing and little-known genius.

"Tedium", the most recurrent theme in these collections, by Pessoa's (or, excuse me, one of his "heteronym's") definition is the "serious disease of feeling there's nothing worth doing." Another one of these heteronyms remarks at an earlier point that "...the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table." This, at any rate, was the effect this book had on me. Normally, I knock off a book of this length in a couple days. It's taken me a month now to complete. Every time I picked up this particular book, I said to myself, time and again, "What's the point? It's just going to be more tedious description of tedium." And I was quite correct. I think most readers would do well to heed another remark made in this book, to wit, that all this has been said before in the book of Ecclesiastes. He might have added that Ecclesiastes is much shorter, more moving and less redundant as well.

What saves The Book of Disquiet from being an utter wash is the conflict essential in it. Pessoa and his heteronyms, despite their sense of life's futility, love literature and words with such utter devotion that living life as if in a book seems the only hope of salvation from the torpor of existence:

"To see all things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events." P.211

This, and Pessoa's beautiful use of language, as translated by Robert Zenith in any event, save the day:

"We don't know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the road like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I'll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world's darkness." P.179

Perhaps a bit on the belaboured side anent reeds and rivers and wild ducks---Still, never was meaningless death by sluggishness so gloriously apotheosized. Passages like this make the book worth reading, perhaps. But, caveat lector, don't expect to close the cover with any sense of enchantment. The book, cover to cover, is full of emptiness.

There are certain writers few and rare who make the reader see the world in a different way. There are certain writers who reveal to us hidden worlds in ourselves and teach us truths on the edge of our consciousness which we by ourselves alone could never bring to revelation. Pessoa is such a writer, a singularity among the singularities. He explores as he himself says his own subjectivity and is a person largely of his own inner world but that inner world never stops encountering and transforming the world its observes outside. Pessoa is a lover of Lisbon of its sights and characters , of its dreams and mysteries. For him each person is a question and at times he surprises us with a vast tenderness which he extends to all. But it is difficult to predict exactly what he is doing. For he is a thinker of the first order who always surprises in the new meanings he finds in the most ordinary and commonplace of experiences. In fact he shows us what Kafka and Pascal did that we do not have to leave our own rooms and mysteries will unfold themselves before our eyes. Solitary, depressed, most alive in his writing, yet finding in a commonplace job worlds of meaning which he also equates to dust, Pessoa plays endless games of meaning and meaninglessness. His writing is fragmentary and meditative, paragraphs of prose- poetry which cannot be read as narrative but must be contemplated in brief and deliberate rethinkings. His originality is unquestionable and the power of his thought apparent in a few sentences, but his world despite his love of weather and clouds and the disquiet they bring him extremely narrow. It is as if he is playing a great game with himself in which he deliberately excludes most of what other human beings care most of , including the love of other people. Nonetheless the distinctiveness is so great that he is one of those who seems to extend our understanding of Literature and life. Reading him is thus in a sense an opportunity for a new kind of development a new way of thinking and seeing - a freedom not given before. Slowly, slowly go through this book and read and reread the clerk- poet and master meaning maker who is Pessoa.