The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)

Excellent observațional and self reflecting writing by Pessoa from all his literary personalities. I don't know why I haven't read him or even heard of him before. I recommend this book since Pessoa writes what we're all thinking but we just can't put it into words. You'll find yourself in this book.

"B of D" is a work of pure genius written in gloriously lyrical, existential prose: it wants to be poetry and, at times, it is. Pessoa is a profoundly introspective and honest writer who defined existential themes based upon his frank study of his own life and dreams: it's possible that Pessoa is the most honest writer who ever lived. He is highly self-critical, self-effacing and suffers from the "disquiet" of his simple life as a bookkeeper in Lisbon. He wrote "B of D" in that richly germinal literary era in Europe of Proust and Joyce. He composed 481 fragments about the absurdity of life by which he means the inability of man to understand his own existence. "Each of us is a speck of dust that the wind lifts up and then drops." Pessoa's disquieting themes eventually grew into the philosophical worldview claimed by the existentialists but he was an existentialist before many of them. Pessoa writes with the passion of Nietzsche. He is Camus before Camus. He has Kafka's rich sense of the absurd. He experiences daily Sartre's nausea. I devoured every word of "B of D" by Pessoa who had the misfortune to remain largely undiscovered and unread until long after his death. His work is existential in the genre of Camus or Sartre ("I think, therefore, I am a mustache.") He is dark, at times, but his introspection is oceanic in its breadth, depth and turbulent existential Angst. His writing has been described as "semi-fiction" and "anti-literature" by his translator. Great writers inevitably challenge the logic of traditional syntax as well as the genres in which they write to transform their genres by the genius of their innovative literary styles which become legacies in themselves. Pessoa writes in fragments which are neither fiction nor poetry but are autobiographical and as such show his disconnect both with life and his own art -- there is no real flow between one fragment and the next like life itself in his existential worldview. He considered his life "an intermission with band music." He also wrote in heteronyms under several noms de plume as if to say he couldn't really even attest to his own single identity as a writer. His fragments are deep, consuming, intellectual dives into his own everyday life. Normally, autobiography is a sign of an immature writer, which Pessoa clearly is not. He writes about his dull job as an accountant among Lisbon's streets and his sightings while smoking at outdoor cafes as well as about thunderstorms, solitude, dreams, the absurdity and futility of life, art, sex, JJ Rousseau and his work. My only criticism of Pessoa comes from his odd observations and poor advice about sex. His translator, Richard Zenith, believes it was possible that Pessoa died a virgin. I make it a practice never ever to take advice on sex from priests, nuns and lifelong virgins. Richard Zenith's translation is truly luminous and he brings rich nuance into the discourse of every line. Like my copy of "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis, I have underlined fragments on nearly every page because it is so deeply relevant, honest and compelling in its pure intellectual grandeur. Here are a few favorite passages which stand out for me from "B of D": "Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, "All I know is that I know nothing' and the other represented by Sanches, when he says, 'I don't even know if I know nothing.'" "No one understands anyone else... However much one soul strives to now another, he can know only what is told him by a word -- a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding... I love expressions because I know nothing of what they express." "I don't know the meaning of this journey I was forced to make, between one and another night, in the company of the whole universe... We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, 'Look at me move.'" "The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential." "All life is a dream. No one knows what he's doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That's why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything. It's an immediate humanitarianism, without aims or conclusions, that overwhelms me right now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone as if moved by the compassion of the world's only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here?" He worked uselessly every business day for a brute capitalist and recognized by night that his writing was utterly hopelessly, inscrutably and irretrievably futile. The miracle, and the sense of this should not be lost upon you, is that every day he still writes anyway like Van Gogh painting despite making only one sale in his lifetime. I recognized Pessoa instantly from the first few fragments of his life in "B of D": I am Pessoa. And he is also you. "Book of Disquiet" is life changing. I can't remember ever having been so disappointed to see a book come to an end: it's that good. I implore you to read this immortal literary work of genius by Pessoa. It may be absurd, and even futile, to do so but sometimes the best answer to both is simply to be just as absurd.

The Book of Disquiet --Fernando Pessoa Really enjoyed this book, one of the best I've ever read. In the form of a diary, with short entries of a sentence, a paragraph, or maybe a page. Poetic and introspective, with absolutely no plot to get in the way, it needs to be read slowly. Richard Zenith's translation, from the original Portuguese, is well noted, with methods explained. That this, posthumous masterpiece, was almost undiscovered, would have been tragic. I never write in, or mark up books, nor do I take notes. However, this one deserves a second reading where I may just do that. Perhaps I'll carry this with me, reading an entry or two, in quiet moments. I've had so many thoughts in my life, that I foolishly considered unique. Yet here they all are, expressed in elegant tedium. Highly recommended.

Arrived in great condition.

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.

This is one of the most profound, moving and interesting books I have ever read. Some of the sentences in it have stopped me dead in my tracks. I shall no doubt be re-reading it for the rest of my days. I must thank Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation, for making me aware of it, I might never have come across it otherwise.

It’s a nice read and great ideas conveyed with no structure. But if you are looking for something structured and concrete, this is not your place.

Good condition.

The musings of a brilliant mind... please read.

Once in a rarest while there comes a delightfully chaotic book that enchants as much as it frustrates, that heals as much as it scorches, and that sooths as much as it disturbs. Reading such a book in which thoughts, consciousness, and perceptions appear as fragments that do not combine to form a coherent whole, one is often left wondering how to make sense of it all. How should one come to grips with its determined melancholy, its breathtaking audacity, and its insistence that inaction, despair, and renunciation are the sine qua non of life? “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa is one such modern masterpiece that I read last week. The book is an aggregation of disparate diary entries that are abstract, dense, and at times, eccentric. For its entire four hundred plus pages it offers a philosophy of a melancholic life, a philosophy of dreaming, and a philosophy of art. I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a unique reading experience. The book is a congeries - a fragmentary collection of angst-ridden aphorisms, reflections, and musings in the form of diary entries found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. In passage after passage that are at once lyrical and haunting, he bares his brooding soul while lying awake through insomniac nights when incessant rain falls on the rooftops of his beloved Lisbon where he lives in a cheap, rented room with cracked walls owned by a loathsome landlady. “Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it.” [p 128] Pessoa was a compulsive writer who penned his thoughts relentlessly, day and night, on whatever he could lay his hands upon – “…in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of envelops, on paper scraps, and the margins of his own earlier texts.” To add to the confusion, Pessoa wrote under different names that he chose to call “heteronyms” – fictional alter egos with their own distinct biographies, writing styles, personalities, political attitudes, and individual pet peeves. These jottings, largely hand written and mostly undated, presented a challenge to the publishers who took years to compile them together into a book structure. The book records his meandering thoughts in which he constantly floats through gossamer boundaries that separate his real world from his dreams, his inaction from his thoughts, and his ambition from his weariness. “The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfillment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen. That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. [p 143] Pessoa’s art consisted of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, and horoscopes and assorted other texts that he wrote through more than four dozen invented heteronyms. Actually, he has credited “The Book of Disquiet” to Bernardo Soares, one such heteronym who is a bookkeeper by profession. Pessoa, as Soares, writes: “Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful. [p 25] For Pessoa, literature is “the most agreeable way of ignoring life” because it “retreats from life by turning it into a slumber.” In a beautiful passage this is how he further explores literature: “To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life.” [p 30] Pessoa wrote poetry and prose both and in an insightful passage explains the difference between the two: “I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.” [P 199] After reading a few pages a day, I would often find myself adrift with thoughts on renunciation or solitude or tedium because, Pessoa ensnares you, seduces you, and grips you with his flights of imagination that are mesmerizing. When he talks about giving things up it is not because he doesn’t what them, but because he does. Can there be a more intriguing Gordian knot? Consider this: “Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.” [p 203] I read the book in dribs and drabs, savoring its flavor, enjoying the voluntary siege to which I surrendered myself. The majestic splendor of Pessoa’s prose often left me heady. Despite the dark and somber tone, there are luminous passages that brim with life. Here is one: “Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my definitive being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.” [p 23] Although he was a prolific writer, Pessoa published merely four books during his lifetime. He left behind more than 25,000 manuscripts and typed pages that are still being deciphered and catalogued by experts. Perhaps he felt there was something noble in not being published because in a rather prescient manner, this is what he writes about an unpublished writer: “The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.” [p 187] Despite Pessoa’s assertion about noble virtues of a non-published writer, I am glad that Penguin has been updating its various editions from time to time as more and more material is getting deciphered. The literary world would have been a poorer place without this effort. I cannot but highly recommend this book that chronicles the life of one of the greatest flaneurs as he walked and worried through the streets of Lisbon assembling and disassembling his own eclectic mind.