Published 47 years after the death of its author, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs offers itself as the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, the work is beautifully translated by Richard Zenith in the Penguin Classics edition.
Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa – Wikipedia and Fernando Pessoa – Portugal.com) was a minor figure in the Lisbon literary world supporting himself by office work and commercial translation. After his death in 1935 of liver cirrhosis, 25,000 sheets of manuscript were discovered in a trunk. A portion of the contents were pieced together to form ‘The Book of Disquiet’. Pessoa reveals himself through literary ‘semi-heteronyms’, of which some eighty have been identified.
We are introduced to Bernardo Soares as having been born in a country village. His mother died whilst he was very young and he never knew her. He is brought up by an aunt and uncle before drifting to Lisbon and working as an assistant book-keeper. He has no interest in society, women or books. Instead he spends the nights smoking and writing. His thoughts, recorded thus, are the fragments of a cold and detached soul.
In the words of George Steiner the work “gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague.” If we read to know we are not alone, according to C.S. Lewis, many will respond to the bleak modernist outlook expressed by Pessoa here.
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560 pages in Penguin Classics
First published in Portuguese in 1982
ISBN-13 : 978-0241200131
