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Available
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Amsterdam De Arbeiderspers 2016
User reviews
LibraryThing member VanishedOne
Here is a book which for all its talk of the art of dreaming demands the fullest external alertness in the reader, since anyone drowsily reading in expectation of a storyline, too close to snuggling into bed to take full pleasure in the craftsmanship of the language, will find himself utterly
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.
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disappointed. A book which requires a stomach for the richest expressiveness (and mercifully lends itself to being read in short sessions), though it almost completely avoids overwritten expressions. A book which demands a ready sensitivity to form and a tolerance for hearing the same notes struck again and again in various combinations; a friend of mine grew tired of all this talk of dreaming in which few passages actually describe these fantastic dreams. A book bound to be best comprehended by persons melancholic as well as dreamy, for whom it will be no tonic, but perhaps also no poison. A book for the meditative, the introspective, the not-quite-successfully escapist, the restless, the regretful, the incurably poetic, and the estranged and lost.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.
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LibraryThing member Ifland
Of all the writers who have truly lived the life of a writer, trying to abolish the border between the I on the paper and the I in the world by transforming the latter into the first, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is probably the best example. Pessoa complemented his literary
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.
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creation with that of several dozen personas, each with a different name and biography. These heteronyms—as Pessoa called them—were masks of Pessoa himself, although it would probably be more accurate to say that they were no one’s masks, as Pessoa often described himself as “no one.” In this respect he personifies poetic existence par excellence because he has transformed an esthetic idea—that of the author as a mask—into a way of being. Or rather: he has transformed his transient, mortal being into a work of art. He was a “passerby of everything, even of my own soul, belonging to nothing, desiring nothing, being nothing—abstract center of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror, reflecting the world’s diversity” (The Book of Disquiet). 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.
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LibraryThing member ursula
The book has got an interesting origin story. Pessoa wrote it in bits and pieces, on scraps of paper, over years. It is the diary of sorts of one of his alter egos, Bernardo Soares, who lives and works in places very similar to Pessoa. The book wasn't published in his lifetime, but instead after
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."
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his death people collected the scraps, assembled them in the order they felt made sense, and published them. Later, some Pessoa scholars came through, rearranged them and published them again in a new order.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."
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LibraryThing member David_David_Katzman
The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These
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.
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scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.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.
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LibraryThing member Cygnus555
This book, along with "An Anatomy of Melancholy" are two books that you can almost pick up, open to any point in the book and be entertained. Beautiful language.
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 story of who Fernando Pessoa was is almost as amazing as the book itself. Incredible incredible incredible.
I was in City Lights
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Bookstore in San Francisco when I came across this, read the back and realized I had to buy it! I was not disappointed. This is not a book that you sit and read front to back (although you certainly can)... but rather as the mood strikes you and to see beautiful language.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.
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LibraryThing member datrappert
How to even begin to review or give a rating to what, at least in my reading experience, is a unique book. This is a completely inward chronicle of a man obsessed by the world of his dreams and thoughts, and convinced that they are at least as true, and almost certainly better, than the real world.
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.
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In the right mood, reading the short passages is a transformative, hypnotic experience. Some of the thoughts are brilliant and will stick with you. Some are not so lucid. A few are truly funny. I should have read this book with a highlighter in hand and would do so if I every choose to re-read it. Or maybe it is better to just dip into it at random, since it has a somewhat random order to begin with, having been assembled from a lot of pieces left in an envelope....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.
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LibraryThing member antao
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
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existirmos e isto não ser tudo†(God is being and this is not allâ€- my translation)… Marvelous or what????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.
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LibraryThing member MSarki
I felt sad when it ended, but glad I finished it. This is a lovely book for exposing one's interior, but I feel that almost anyone thoughtful enough could have written it. It is a book for all "like minds" to enjoy being friends with. And to my dismay there was really nothing new here under the
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sun. After completing two books of poems and now this, my study of Fernando Pessoa is over. Show Less
LibraryThing member pessoanongrata
"I created myself, echo and abyss, by thinking. I multiplied myself, by going deeply into myself. The smallest episode--a change of light, the crumpled fall of a dead leaf, the petal that drops off and commits yellowcide, the voice on the other side of the wall or the footsteps of the person behind
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
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the voice next to those who should be listening to the voice, the half-open gate to the old estate, the patio that opens with an arch onto the houses heaped up in the moonlight--all these things, which do not belong to me, tie up my sensory meditation with cords of resonance and nostalgia. In each one of these sensations I am someone else, I renew myself painfully in each indefinite impression.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
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LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
Oh, God, this is amazing.
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
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
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to write something more fitting later. Show Less
LibraryThing member Luli81
I have this habit of keeping a pencil close by when I'm reading a book which I know is going to have some passages I want to remember. So, whenever I come across a sentence or a paragraph that strikes me for some reason, I underline it.
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.
Well now, what's mostly happened with my copy of the "The book
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of disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa is that there is something underlined in almost every page of the book. Which is the same to say that this is a memorable book on the whole. I'd even dare to say that this is more than a mere book, it is a gate to upper thinking, a new way of understanding the world, a new philosophy, a daring and maybe even scary but sincere approach to what is hidden in our human souls, if we are brave enough to look.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.
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LibraryThing member Randy_Hierodule
The book of the crossroads, of the synapse. Here are revealed the sacred mysteries of tedium. Within I have found my black mirror, the echoed song I drown in. Balm of nepenthe in cheap binding! - the gospel to be mumbled at my baptismal or requiem Mass. And last, but not least, the cenotaph of the
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voice I never found, of dreams strangled as they slid from the womb. Show Less
LibraryThing member David_David_Katzman
The Book of Disquiet should be read slowly and thoughtfully, savored and sipped like fine wine. It’s a groundbreaking work of Modernist experimentation that consists of a collection of writings found on disorganized scraps of paper in a chest found in the author’s home after his death. These
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.
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scraps were assembled into a book for the first time in the 1960s. Pessoa, who was Portuguese, wrote the segments over the course of the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1935.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.
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LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
This was, frankly, a struggle, and I feel bad about that because so many have taken so much from the writings of Fernando Pessoa. I simply found it nigh-on impossible to latch onto much of what he was talking about. Stripped of characters and action, his thoughts seemed untethered and rambling. In
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places I found things to take away of value, but the effort I had to put into finishing this book was rarely rewarded. Show Less
LibraryThing member kylecarroll
DNF @ 29%. Started off interesting enough, but eventually felt like a chore to read.
LibraryThing member carioca
This book is incredible, and it occupies a place all of its own. A mixture of diary, fiction, autobiography, philosophy and poetry-in-prose, I still revert back to it every few months. It is that beautiful. I actually own it in the original Portuguese as well and this English translation does not
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disappoint in the least - it is very good. Not an easy task to translate Pessoa as he certainly had amazing language control. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
A collection of short prose pieces — a kind of diary — from the thirties, which Pessoa attributes to one of his heteronyms, "Bernardo Soares", supposedly a somewhat antisocial, depressed bookkeeper in an import/export business in Lisbon's Baixa. Soares reflects paradoxically on the benefits of
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...
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not engaging with real life, social interactions, love, travel, the literary world, and all the rest: he steadfastly maintains that it's far more satisfying to live your life in dreams and imagination; better to have boredom to dream about escaping from than to achieve something that leaves you disappointed. Rather a negative position, but Soares argues it with a great deal of humour and irony, and this is a book with a quotable sentence or two on every page. Indeed, its supreme quotability is perhaps what undermines it a bit: it can feel at times as though you are reading a tear-off calendar. The solution seems to be to take it slowly, almost as if it were actually a calendar.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...
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LibraryThing member Kristelh
This is a slog for me. I did not enjoy it as a novel because it is not a novel. It is a collections of one man's thoughts. Fernando Pessoa is a Portuguese man and this so called book was published posthumously. Yes there are some interesting sentences, prose, but it is not a novel. It used up an
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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entire month which I can only regret. This man may have been deeply depressed and I can only think that his family wants to make money off his writings. I am not sure the man would have wanted it published. 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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LibraryThing member hbergander
A book, on which the author worked more than twenty years, filled with dense portrayals of emotional states and considerations of daily life in infinitely accurate descriptions. If Marcel Proust’s writing style would be compared with bittersweet chocolate, Fernando Pessoa makes us the present of
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nougat. Show Less
LibraryThing member albertgoldfain
The 'Book of Disquiet' is a deeply felt and existential expression of the author's restless mind. Even in translation, the book is so quotable that it is actually hard to quote or highlight a single passage! A fragmented and plotless plight of a perfectionist trying to create what (a priori) he
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knows will be imperfect. Pessoa seems to equate the poet's writer's block with a broader block to living at all. At times, the narrator is a little too woeful and a little to certain of what he is saying. The Book of Disquiet is organized as a sort of diary of random thoughts. Very often these thoughts are left incomplete and undeveloped...but this actually is more along the lines how minds work. Show Less
LibraryThing member breathslow
This is a unique and spell-binding collection of random meditations on the dreaminess of life; the impossibilities and possibilities of relating, communicating or understanding; the illusions and sensations of ordinary or extraordinary awareness; journeys of the imagination; and so on and so on. It
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could have gone on forever, and I'm glad it didn't - while I found it relaxing and intriguing and thought-provoking, I could only read it in small dollops, like tasting again and again a favourite ice-cream, both satisfying and too rich to consume in quantity. Despite the fig-leaf of an authorial character, there is no plot, no narrative as such. It's fiction, but not quite as we know it. A fiction of a wandering mind, as it alights on an evanescent series of forms of attention, fantasy and opaque reminiscence without landing on many of the concrete practical details of everyday conscious living. Yes there are glimpses of other people and an office and some urban environment with which this mind is loosely wreathed, but they are ghosts in a spiritual, philosophical and psychological fog through which Pessoa's writing twists and bounces in a kind of Brownian motion of the soul. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
Portuguese
Original publication date
1982
Physical description
612 p.; 19 cm
ISBN
9789029539579