THE BOOK OF DISQUIET Hardcover – Import, 28 May 1991

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.

Strange as it may sound, I vaguely anticipated a book like this all along since l started reading. It is not a book, it is yourself, myself and all others without being just anyone of us. Whosoever chances to flip through the title image, PLEASE don't hesitate to buy it forthwith. I am grateful to Amazon for giving me an opportunity to be introduced to a disquiet I so long persisted, pretended not to listen to.

This book is widely being read , since I really see extracts being used as references by young writers . It’s a slow read yet very thoughtful. The style is very innovative and contemporary. However, I find the thoughts of the writer very repititive. Good for philosophy lovers .

I loved the book a lot. Its a brooding slow paced book. Ever minuscule detail of the trivial things of a man's life is infused with a lyricism rare in today's fiction . there is no story as we understand in the common sense of the term but there is artistry no denying that. It is a book which will make you think and create an urge in you to question the fundamentals of life. Why do we live? How do we love? how do we end up being lonely? what is the meaning of this life? and it might create the urge in you to write.But few pages were torn and some were missing . If you are lucky you might get a good copy.

This book is something that will drown you into melancholy and at the same time shatter many of your beliefs. Reading only for an hour alienates you from everything around. This book is a gem and acquaints you with different ideas.

Excellent book. Worthy of all the praise it gets. After a long long time i have got a book by Penguin that is sturdy, beautifully printed.

This is a brilliant book. Perhaps one of my all-time favourites. Cannot recommend it enough. Repays a reader willing to immerse herself/himself in it and meander along with the lovely writing. Love this edition, this translation.

Writing of Pessoa is unique and wonderful! It gives one insight into the life of a loner but nevetheless a great writer!

Fernando Pessoa, in order to express various philosophical and poetic moods, constructed a series of what he termed “heteronyms.” The heteronym, although similar to the mask or persona, differs in that each one is equipped with a name, a personality, a biography, and a physical description, as well as a distinct writing style. Although Pessoa made use of more than five dozen heteronyms in the course of his thirty-five years, the best known are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares. Of these four, his greatest creation--and perhaps the heteronym closest to Pessoa's self--is Bernardo Soares, the "author" of The Book of Disquiet.The Book of Disquiet, if not unique, is close to it. It is a little like a novel, often like a collection of prose poems, and often like a series of aphorisms and philosophical reflections. The heteryonum that is Soares enables Pessoa to communicate a disciplined, definite vision of the world, necessarily limited in scope, but intensified and concentrated. In this sense, it resembles Roman and English satire, its authorial mask as carefully crafted and resonant as those of Horace and Juvenal, Pope and Swift. Soares, however, takes no interest in vice, let alone the reform of humankind; in fact, he seems to care little about humanity in general, or people in particular.It is here that the novelistic aspect of this work becomes interesting. Soares is a shy, isolated man, a clerk at a Lisbon commercial firm who adds up columns of figures, and seems to do little else. Although he mourns his colleagues when they pass away, he never seems to communicate with them when they are alive; the closest he seems to get to fellowship are his encounters with the waiter in the little cafe where he eats his nightly dinner and consumes his nightly bottle of wine. At first, we feel sorry for him, for we feel his great isolation and are moved by his great passion and profound love for beauty which he can only express through his journal.Slowly, however, we begin to see that this isolation is a personal and artistic choice, a way of refining his art and his being . If he cares about human beings at all, it is only because they are useful adjuncts to his own magnificent loneliness, because they resonate as discrete elements of the poet's imagination, much as a certain play of light on a Lisbon street may reflect one particular color of the canvas that is the poet's consciousness. Perhaps this is why the book “The Book of Disquiet” reminds me of most is The Chants of Maldoror, that uncompromising paean to the magnificent isolation of evil.There is of course a great difference. Maldoror could only have been produced by a very young man hiding beneath a very old mask. His persona is a posture of isolation through which he begins to know himself. The Book of Disquiet, on the other hand, is the work of someone who knows himself well, and cares only about reaching a kind of existential purity: a clarity of view, a refinement of mood, the isolation of particular beauties that resonate more deeply and linger longer than the others.Soares is a monk of the poetic mind, for whom aloneness is a vocation. Its fruit, this memorable book, is rare and delicious, filled with vivid descriptions, evocative language, and refined reflections.

I bought this along time ago and I'm slowly working my way through it. He wrote very well indeed. Pity he didn't edit in his lifetime.

It is only possible to read this strange book in small doses. Try it and you will see what I mean.

all good

Bought as a gift! As expected!