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The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa's greatest literary achievement. An "autobiography" or "diary" containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa's death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa's entire writing life. --… (more)
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In a letter quoted in the book, Pessoa wrote that if he was successful, one passage in particular would be felt as 'a dreamed confession of the painful, sterile rage and utter uselessness of dreaming'. He failed; beauty, even elegiac beauty, is too beguiling. But it is a frigid beauty all the same; dip into this book, and keep a warmer and more human one beside it to bring you back to earth.
If, as Paul Celan (whose last name is also a pen name, or more precisely an anagram of his “real” name, Ancel) has said, in the making of a poem, the I transforms himself entirely into a sign, Pessoa pushes the game of writing to its limit. In transforming himself into several dozen poets, he literally changes himself into numerous signs. It isn’t only his language that is an artifact; by incarnating Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares et al., Fernando Pessoa becomes himself an artifact, a beautiful fiction.
The heteronym with which Pessoa signed one of his most important works, The Book of Disquiet (prose), is Bernardo Soares. Described as an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon, Soares is distinct from Pessoa in ideas, feelings, modes of perception and understanding, but “does not differ from [him:] in his style” (Pessoa, “Concerning the Work of Bernardo Soares,” quoted in the Preface, p. 209).
In creating these heteronyms, Pessoa’s intention is to establish a “Portuguese neo-paganism, with various authors, each different.” More than once he embraces incoherence and change as the underlying principles of his life, and mystery and the unknown as the only things he knows.
No section in the book is more than a few pages long. Some are only a sentence. Soares is an isolated, depressed, contemplative man who is convinced he'll never amount to much. The book is best read as a sort of devotional, I think (or anti-devotional, maybe) - a few pages a day, or opening to a random page and reading the part you're faced with. Under the circumstances of its existence, it can hardly matter if you don't read it in order.
The Portuguese have a word, saudade, which is roughly nostalgia, but really deeper and more profound than that. It implies a sense of loss that goes beyond simple nostalgia - it's possible to feel it for things that aren't gone yet, simply because you know that they will be. Pessoa's writing is full of saudade. He is nostalgic for the world of his dreams, which has never existed and never will. He is nostalgic for the sunset he is watching, because although there will be others, there will never be this one again. He is nostalgic for the childhood he didn't have.
Beautiful, but not to be rushed through. This mind is not one to spend too much time inside.
Recommended for: romantics, city-dwellers, lovers of Lisbon
Quote: "Dawn in the countryside just exists; dawn in the city overflows with promise. One makes you live, the other makes you think. And, along with all the other great unfortunates, I've always believed it better to think than to live."
Pessoa invented multiple personas for himself that he called heteronyms, and each of his novels or collections of poetry was written from the perspective of an alter ego. He essentially invented multiple authors and wrote from their perspective. It’s a distinct approach from having a character narrate a novel, especially when it comes to writing a collection of poetry, but even in this “novel” because there is no plot to speak of, only an internal landscape. Pessoa makes no effort to distinguish his own critique of the “author’s opinions,” he merely embodies them. In other words, there is no authorial distance, no “unreliable narrator” theme, there is only the narrator. It is as if Pessoa had a multiple personality disorder in artistic form. The collection of writings in this book are measures of the interior life of one Bernardo Soares, which Pessoa described as being a “mutilated version” of himself, but perhaps the closest to his own beliefs of all his heteronyms. He describes Soares as rather like “himself minus the affection.”
Indeed, Soares comes across as so purely intellectual (although he does have the occasional overwhelming emotional response to small occurrences) that he is rather distant and cold—completely self-absorbed and narcissistic, in fact. Soares lives a life that is almost entirely metaphysical. In one of the 276 segments in the book, he refers to this collection as a “book of disconnected impressions.” Some might say that this isn’t a novel! But in the case of what is important to Soares (or to Pessoa), intellectual thought is apparently the only process that sustains his life. It is the story of his life, which was very little but intellectual.
We get glimpses of this persona at work, as an accountant poring over ledgers (which is what Pessoa did as well), and walking the streets of Lisbon, but for the most part, nothing ever happens. Soares lives a life only in his mind and in his daydreams. He is scared and reluctant to say hello or even shake hands with others. It is too shocking, too much for him. Much like Proust who wrote an entire series of book triggered by the taste of a single Madeleine cookie, Soares believes that an artist must be able to wring the greatest emotional effect out of the smallest incidents. So why write of large incidents when small ones suffice?
What subjects does Soares ponder as we make our way through this book? What is the book about? Walking and weather. Fame and ambition, rain and dreams. Banality, the banality of existence. Change or the lack there of. Dreams, especially dreams. Work. God. Writing and art. Identity and being.
At times he can seem quite humble, or more precisely, assured of his own inadequacy and contemptuous of himself, believing that everything he writes is worthless and a failure, railing at his own—and by proxy, every writers’—inability to truly represent ideas or thoughts in words (this being quite reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s view that language mediates our understanding of reality). Yet other times he can seem utterly arrogant in his narcissism. Other people are merely props for his internal dreams and thinking, and in fact he boldly declares at one point, “… of what importance is to me what life is to other people?” Because, he would say, we can only live life from our own perspective and to attempt “empathy” is a delusion. Other people aren’t even real to any of us—except as dreams.* Sometimes this seems almost Buddhist—we are dreaming life and because all is change, nothing is real and all there is is nothing. “The self is nothing more than all it is thinking in the moment.” Other times, it comes across as clearly Nietzschean, which would seem close to Pessoa's own ideology because he was a royalist of sorts. Soares believes that humans want to be enslaved not free. He has certain fascist tendencies that peek through his primarily apolitical musings. For example, he declares himself both anti-revolutionary and anti-reformist. Much like Nietzsche who sought to create amoral übermen, he is anti-social and believes that pursuing matters of social justice are not only a waste of time, but also a false presumption of pride and ambition in the self, to shape society. Furthermore, such actions support the premise that other people are “real” when in fact they are only dreams.** And then on the flipside of this, humans are unimportant and vulgar animals anyway: "Life disgusts me."
When he talks about work, he seems to say that work (not artist work, but paid commercial work) is an opportunity to become nothing—a mere tool, a non-thing—and to Soares, this is good, this is the enslavement that people want. The more the self can vanish as meaningless, the better. He criticizes ambition to “do something better” as pure vanity.
How can I give this book four stars when there are such disagreeable elements? Well, firstly, one doesn’t have to agree with everything in a book philosophically to find it a great book. Sometimes, finding a point of view that one can disagree with is just as valuable. And secondarily, he spends most of the book pondering apolitical questions of the nature of perception, emotion, and identity revealing brilliant bon mots that remind me of Montaigne such as, “There is nothing that shows poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.” Admittedly, I did feel at times as though I were slogging through an ambiguous fog that didn’t quite make sense, but then I would come to a burst of insight like a spotlight that illuminates the way. In the end, these insights (whether they be about life in general, or whether they gave me insights into certain types of people with tendencies like the narrator), were often profound enough to elevate this book to quite a high status.
All in all, this book will only appeal to those readers comfortable with deep thoughts lacking a plot, and willing to persevere, but the rewards can be great.
*I counter this by noting that if everything is a dream and everyone is a dream then all that matters is dreams and empathy for dreams is just as valid as non-empathy for dreams.
**It’s important to recognize that someone is always shaping society—those who are already in power. Therefore, in fact, passively supporting the status quo is just as much a political action as resisting the status quo. It’s merely the path of least resistance…that is, until your freedom or means of self-survival are stake.
the story of who Fernando Pessoa was is almost as amazing as the book itself. Incredible incredible incredible.
I was in City Lights
A quote in closing "We never know self-realization. We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky." no - not a cheerful read - but so necessary.
The problem, however, is that the author tends to repeat himself or approach the same idea from slightly different directions. Sometimes this yields a memorable passage; sometimes it is just tedious. Or maybe it just depends on the reader's state of mind at the time. If you are a confirmed introvert, this book could certainly serve as a self-justification. It is important, however, to separate the narrator of the book from its author (or authors, since Pessoa had several alter-egos and at least two of them were assigned authorship at one point or another.) It is best to think of this (at least I think...) as a book about the power of the mind, and the overriding importance of perception. The narrator, a bookkeeper in a Lisbon office, who hardly goes anywhere, lives in a world that is immense, perhaps infinite, and seems to have little need for the actual physical world or human companionship. Or maybe he is just fooling himself and overcompensating--making up, in the only way he can, for a personality defect that isolates him from reality.
By all means, take a chance on this one. The editor/translator has done an amazing job given the raw material, and if you read through the introduction (I suggest re-reading it after you have finished), you'll have more insight into the life and state of mind of the man who left us this unique monument to solipsism.
Rate = original in portuguese = 6 stars (in terms of the Goodreads' rating system, I gave it 5 stars)
Rate = Zenith's translation (the one I've just read) = 3 stars
I’ve read this book in Portuguese a long time ago, and I still remember vividly some of the passages, eg, “ Deus é
I find a strong resemblance between Rilke and Pessoa, but I never really thought about it, that is, I cannot demonstrate why I think that … It’s worth thinking about.
This is one of the rare books, where the fact that you like it (or not), depends on who you are.
The persons who think it’s just plain drivel, belong to one side of the barricade. The persons, who feel changed just by reading it, belong to the other side.
In terms of translation from Portuguese into English, I prefer the William Boyd's and Margaret Costa's versions (especially the latter). Zenith's take on Pessoa seems somehow stilted... Costa's version is much more poetic (at least to me).
Enough said. Do yourself a favour and read one of the other translations in english.
I live on impressions that don't belong to me, prodigal with renunciations, just another version of myself."
-p22
"The happiness of all these men who don't know they are wretched irritates me. Their human lives are filled with things that would be anguishing experiences for a real sensibility. But since their real lives are vegetative , whatever they suffer passes through them without touching their souls, and they lead lives that are only comparable to that of a man with a toothache to whom the gods had just given a fortune--the authentic fortune of being alive. But the greatest gift the gods can bestow is that of being like them--superior in the way they are (even if in a different fashion) to happiness and grief.
Which is why, despite everything, I love them all. My beloved vegetables!"
-p55
I've covered the whole thing with frenzied annotations. I need to lie down and think for a moment. This is a beautiful and melancholy look into the loneliness of the dark of the human spirit. Overwhelmed. Pessoa is a genius at describing solitude and dreaming.
Will come back
Well now, what's mostly happened with my copy of the "The book
I knew a bit of Pessoa before I picked up this book. Vastly known Portuguese poet, famous for his ability to create different "personalities" and stick to them closely to perfection, writing in different styles according to the voice of each character. Schizophrenia? Or the mind of a genius who fooled everyone who knew him? Or a man who disguised himself out of boredom and who was able to live more than 70 different and complete lives through all these invented "characters" to become a complete real person? Maybe all these options at once. Maybe none. We'll never know.
Anyway, even though I knew about Pessoa, I wasn't prepared for this book.
Not only unconnected recollections of the "supposed" life of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's characters, but also unanswerable questions which left me kind of anxious and peaceful at the same time, if that makes any sense...
Questions regarding consciousness, the almost obsession about dreams and the state of peaceful lethargy of sleeping, doubts aroused regarding deities, love and death. And about what it is to be happy or to feel nostalgia about a non existent past, or about egoism and solitude. But all this questions made even more intense with this overflowing passion for writing, and for literature. And for Lisbon.
A privileged mind which opens for us, humble readers who want to witness an amazing transformation of the world surrounding us, seeing for the first time what our lives really are, or what they aren't and what we should expect them to be.
An experience which will leave you exhausted but with renewed energy to face this extenuating and unavoidable journey which we call life.
Pessoa invented multiple personas for himself that he called heteronyms, and each of his novels or collections of poetry was written from the perspective of an alter ego. He essentially invented multiple authors and wrote from their perspective. It’s a distinct approach from having a character narrate a novel, especially when it comes to writing a collection of poetry, but even in this “novel” because there is no plot to speak of, only an internal landscape. Pessoa makes no effort to distinguish his own critique of the “author’s opinions,” he merely embodies them. In other words, there is no authorial distance, no “unreliable narrator” theme, there is only the narrator. It is as if Pessoa had a multiple personality disorder in artistic form. The collection of writings in this book are measures of the interior life of one Bernardo Soares, which Pessoa described as being a “mutilated version” of himself, but perhaps the closest to his own beliefs of all his heteronyms. He describes Soares as rather like “himself minus the affection.”
Indeed, Soares comes across as so purely intellectual (although he does have the occasional overwhelming emotional response to small occurrences) that he is rather distant and cold—completely self-absorbed and narcissistic, in fact. Soares lives a life that is almost entirely metaphysical. In one of the 276 segments in the book, he refers to this collection as a “book of disconnected impressions.” Some might say that this isn’t a novel! But in the case of what is important to Soares (or to Pessoa), intellectual thought is apparently the only process that sustains his life. It is the story of his life, which was very little but intellectual.
We get glimpses of this persona at work, as an accountant poring over ledgers (which is what Pessoa did as well), and walking the streets of Lisbon, but for the most part, nothing ever happens. Soares lives a life only in his mind and in his daydreams. He is scared and reluctant to say hello or even shake hands with others. It is too shocking, too much for him. Much like Proust who wrote an entire series of book triggered by the taste of a single Madeleine cookie, Soares believes that an artist must be able to wring the greatest emotional effect out of the smallest incidents. So why write of large incidents when small ones suffice?
What subjects does Soares ponder as we make our way through this book? What is the book about? Walking and weather. Fame and ambition, rain and dreams. Banality, the banality of existence. Change or the lack there of. Dreams, especially dreams. Work. God. Writing and art. Identity and being.
At times he can seem quite humble, or more precisely, assured of his own inadequacy and contemptuous of himself, believing that everything he writes is worthless and a failure, railing at his own—and by proxy, every writers’—inability to truly represent ideas or thoughts in words (this being quite reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s view that language mediates our understanding of reality). Yet other times he can seem utterly arrogant in his narcissism. Other people are merely props for his internal dreams and thinking, and in fact he boldly declares at one point, “… of what importance is to me what life is to other people?” Because, he would say, we can only live life from our own perspective and to attempt “empathy” is a delusion. Other people aren’t even real to any of us—except as dreams.* Sometimes this seems almost Buddhist—we are dreaming life and because all is change, nothing is real and all there is is nothing. “The self is nothing more than all it is thinking in the moment.” Other times, it comes across as clearly Nietzschean, which would seem close to Pessoa's own ideology because he was a royalist of sorts. Soares believes that humans want to be enslaved not free. He has certain fascist tendencies that peek through his primarily apolitical musings. For example, he declares himself both anti-revolutionary and anti-reformist. Much like Nietzsche who sought to create amoral übermen, he is anti-social and believes that pursuing matters of social justice are not only a waste of time, but also a false presumption of pride and ambition in the self, to shape society. Furthermore, such actions support the premise that other people are “real” when in fact they are only dreams.** And then on the flipside of this, humans are unimportant and vulgar animals anyway: "Life disgusts me."
When he talks about work, he seems to say that work (not artist work, but paid commercial work) is an opportunity to become nothing—a mere tool, a non-thing—and to Soares, this is good, this is the enslavement that people want. The more the self can vanish as meaningless, the better. He criticizes ambition to “do something better” as pure vanity.
How can I give this book four stars when there are such disagreeable elements? Well, firstly, one doesn’t have to agree with everything in a book philosophically to find it a great book. Sometimes, finding a point of view that one can disagree with is just as valuable. And secondarily, he spends most of the book pondering apolitical questions on the nature of perception, emotion, and identity revealing brilliant bon mots that remind me of Montaigne such as, “There is nothing that shows poverty of mind more quickly than not knowing how to be witty except at the expense of others.” Admittedly, I did feel at times as though I were slogging through an ambiguous fog that didn’t quite make sense, but then I would come to a burst of insight like a spotlight that illuminates the way. In the end, these insights (whether they be about life in general, or whether they gave me insights into certain types of people with tendencies like the narrator), were often profound enough to elevate this book to quite a high status.
All in all, this book will only appeal to those readers comfortable with deep thoughts lacking a plot, and willing to persevere, but the rewards can be great.
*I counter this by noting that if everything is a dream and everyone is a dream then all that matters is dreams and empathy for dreams is just as valid as non-empathy for dreams.
**It’s important to recognize that someone is always shaping society—those who are already in power. Therefore, in fact, passively supporting the status quo is just as much a political action as resisting the status quo. It’s merely the path of least resistance…that is, until your freedom or means of survival are stake.
Like much of Pessoa's work, this was published posthumously, so there are a lot of arguments about which parts really belong to the book, which are meant to be by Soares and which by Pessoa, and so on, and various rival English translations based on different editions of the original text. You can have endless fun with that, if you want...
Some quotes;
1. Each autumn that comes brings us closer to what will be our last autumn;
2. How am I to know what evils I may cause when I give alms, or if I attempt to educate or instruct? In case of doubt, I abstain. I believe, moreover, that to help or clarify is, in a way, to commit the evil of intervening in someone else’s life.
3. Yes, tedium is boredom with the world, the malaise of living, the weariness of having lived; in truth, tedium is the feeling in one’s flesh of the endless emptiness of things.
This book is "tedium". I will not go back to read this though I could see using it to find some great quotes perhaps.
Rating is less than 1 star but slightly more than 0.
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http://books.google.it/books?id=dSXbYPnUhbIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it#v...
"Il libro di Soares è certamente un romanzo. O meglio, è un romanzo doppio, perché Pessoa ha inventato un personaggio di nome Bernardo Soares e gli ha delegato il compito di scrivere un diario. Soares è cioè un personaggio di finzione che adopera la sottile finzione letteraria dell'autobiografia. In questa autobiografia senza fatti di un personaggio inesistente consiste l'unica grande opera narrativa che Pessoa ci abbia lasciato: il suo romanzo."
(piopas)