![]() ![]() ![]() Pessoa himself planned a “rigorous” pruning and revision of Guedes’s droning that never occurred, and newcomers to The Book of Disquiet should consider skipping straight to Soares’s half. “I want your reading of this book to leave you with the sense of having lived through some voluptuous nightmare,” he declares. Guedes is all preening self-absorption and jejune metaphysics he’s like an introverted version of Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Pessoa wrote Guedes’s section first, and it’s easy to see why these earlier texts, which date from 1913 to 1920, have been left out or buried among Soares’s entries in previous editions of the novel. ![]() Arranging these fragments chronologically for the first time, Pizarro reveals that Pessoa composed them in the voices of two distinct characters: the office clerk Vicente Guedes and the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares. Composed mostly on the eve and during the aftermath of World War I, The Book of Disquiet looks movingly at inertia and refusal it’s the Portuguese cousin of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Waiting for Godot.įirst published in 1982, 47 years after Pessoa’s death, The Book of Disquiet presents a series of “random impressions,” diarylike passages that double as articulations of personal philosophy. A triumph of scholarship and translation, this collaboration between editor Pizarro and translator Jull Costa presents in English one of the greatest works of Portuguese fiction in its entirety for the first time. ![]()
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