From Publishers Weekly
Pessoa (1888-1935), identified by Barnard professor MacAdam as Portugal's major 20th-century writer, seems to have interpreted Whitman's statement "I contain multitudes" as an imperative; the gifted and perfectionist poet gave voice to a variety of selves, whom he named not with pseudonyms but with what he called heteronyms. The elegant volume here is the "diary" of "Bernardo Soares," presented as a bookkeeper, like Pessoa, who is obsessed with the role and aim of literature and tries, therefore, to become "like a character in a book, a read life." No plot orders the entries, nor is there any discernible progression. Instead, Pessoa speculates on the paradoxes of art ("Only when I'm disguised am I really myself"), at times mordantly ("To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut"), at times quixotically ("Writing is like the drug I despise but take, the vice I loathe but practice"), nearly always aphoristically. Readers with a particular interest in modernism will find this work indispensable. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Recognized as Portugal's greatest poet since Camoens, Pessoa (1888-1935) wrote poetry under various heteronyms to whom he attributed biographies different from his own. Likewise, this rich and rewarding notebook kept by the solitary, celibate, and semi-alcoholic Pessoa during the last two decades of his life, is written under yet another heteronym (Bernardo Soares), a Lisbon bookkeeper with a position that is like a siesta and a salary that allows him to go on living. Soares knows no pleasure like that of books, yet he reads little. Like Camus, he is irritated by the happiness of men who don't know they are wretched, and his main objective is to perceive tedium in such a way that it ceases to hurt. There are no gossipy details in this heteronymous memoir, only the cerebral workings of a first-rate thinker on the dilemma of life. Full of fresh metaphors and unique perceptions, The Book of Disquiet can be casually scanned and read profitably even at random.- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Book News, Inc.
The first English translation (by Alfred Mac Adam) of selections from the major prose work of Pessoa (1888-1935), the most important Portuguese man of letters of the 20th century, and often identified, along with Rilke and Yeats, as one of the greatest European poets of the century. Composed (under the heteronym of Bernardo Soares) of reveries and everyday impressions from the last two decades of Pessoa's life, The book of disquiet partakes of the genres of the intimate diary, prose poetry, and the descriptive narrative. Of inestimable importance. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.


Review
There is a distinguished mind at work beneath the totally acceptable dullness of clerking. The mind is that of Pessoa. We must be given the chance to learn more about him’ Anthony Burgess, Observer ‘This book has moved me more than anything I have read in years. I have rarely encountered such exhilarating lugubriousness’ Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph


Book Description
Fiction. Autobiography. Translated from the Portuguese with an introduction and translator's notes by Alfred Mac Adam. These short, aphoristic paragraphs, ranging in size from a few sentences to a few pages, comprise the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa's many devastatingly captivating literary alter egos. Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers in one: his works were composed by what he named "heteronyms," alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, horoscopes. THE BOOK OF DISQUIET was found after Pessoa's death, on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, and was finally published nearly 50 years later. "A fractured assemblage of quasi-symbolist reveries, cynical epigrams, musings on quotidian torpor, and gorgeously wrought depressive fits, the book is probably as close as Pessoa could ever come to writing an autobiography." (--VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT) "I was a genius more than in my dreams and less than in life. This is my tragedy. I was the runner who fell almost at the tape, and when I was almost there, I was the first." If genius consists of complicated and heartfelt musings, delightful and incisive use of language (not to mention magnificent translation), and brilliance of mind and expression, then certainly this book is an act (or perpetration?) of genius.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Portugese

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. The Portuguese author attributed his work to literary alter egos that he called "heteronyms," each of which had a fully developed identity. When Pessoa died, he left behind a trunk filled with disorderly scraps of unpublished poems and unfinished works, among which was The Book of Disquiet. Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.

Edited and Translated with an Introduction by Richard Zenith

About the Author:Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was born in Lisbon and raised in South Africa. After returning to Lisbon to study, he made a living as a translator and wrote obsessively in English, French, and Portuguese. While acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A better title might be The Books of Disquiet . Each entry in this fictional diary of one Bernardo Soares represents an attempt to create a distinct biography, for Soares lives according to the maxim: ``Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.'' Through every rumination he records Soares longs to father someone because he is ``nobody, absolutely nobody.'' His monotonous work as a bookkeeper in a Lisbon office and his solitary, celibate existence have contributed to the dissolution of his identity. Yet this grants him the ultimate imaginative freedom: ``Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything.'' One effect of this freedom is a sense of exhaustion before the sheer number of possibilities for being. Another is a sense--at once paternal and disturbingly erotic--of intimacy with the whole human race. Of sleep Soares muses: ``When someone sleeps they become a child. . . . I experience an immense, boundless tenderness for all of infantile humanity.'' More elegantly translated here than in the recent Pantheon edition, this novel presents paradoxes of identity that are more than just an occasion for meditation for Pessoa (1888-1935), one of Portugal's greatest writers and among this century's most enigmatic. They parallel Pessoa's own lived experience. He created several distinct personalities--called ``heteronyms''--through which he wrote in an astonishing variety of styles and even in different languages. Soares represents a ``semiheteronym,'' perhaps closest of all to the ``real'' Pessoa. Whoever Pessoa was, he managed to address through Soares's abstruse, at times excruciatingly precious musings the essential condition of human identity as represented in Western literature. Soares's separation from a common order might be the stuff of tragedy but for the fact that ``my self-imposed rupture with any contact with things, led me precisely to what I was trying to flee.'' For all his quixotic tilting at windmills, Soares admits: ``Whenever I see the figure of a young girl in the street . . . I wonder, however idly, how it would be if she were mine.'' Yet Sancho Panza's suit never hangs on Soares's skinny bones, and this is his dilemma. He is stalled between the poles of tragedy and comedy: ``I can be neither nothing nor everything: I'm just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.'' And herein lies the reason for the multifarious forms of his--and our--disquiet. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

When Pessoa died in 1935, a few years short of 50, he left behind a trunk of mostly unpublished writing in a variety of languages; his Lisbon publishers and variously translators are still sifting them. This perpetually unclassifiable and unfinished book of self-reflective fragments was first published in Portuguese in 1982, and it is arguably Pessoa's masterpiece. Four previous English translations, all published in 1991, were compromised either by abridgement, poor translation or error-laden source texts. While he's now a Pessoa veteran-having edited and translated Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation winner-Zenith's first pass at this book was one of the four misses. He bases this new translation on his own Portuguese edition of 1998, and has done an admirable job in bringing out the force and clarity in Pessoa's serpentine and sometimes opaque meditations. Pessoa often wrote as various personae (as Pessoa & Co. carefully demonstrated); Disquiet is no exception, being putatively the work of "Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon." Thus it is impossible to ascribe the book's anti-humanist logophilia directly to the author: "I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry." That is just one of many permutations of similar sentiments, but the genius of Pessoa and his personae is that readers are left weighing each and every such sentence for sincerity and truth value. (Dec. 3) Forecast: The release of this book as part of the newly redesigned Penguin Classics series should further assure Pessoa's place in the modernist pantheon. Pessoa and Co. was well reviewed, but the fact that Disquiet's previous appearances in English were relatively recent may limit review attention. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Recognized as Portugal's greatest poet since Camoens, Pessoa (1888-1935) wrote poetry under various heteronyms to whom he attributed biographies different from his own. Likewise, this rich and rewarding notebook kept by the solitary, celibate, and semi-alcoholic Pessoa during the last two decades of his life, is written under yet another heteronym (Bernardo Soares), a Lisbon bookkeeper with a position that is like a siesta and a salary that allows him to go on living. Soares knows no pleasure like that of books, yet he reads little. Like Camus, he is irritated by the happiness of men who don't know they are wretched, and his main objective is to perceive tedium in such a way that it ceases to hurt. There are no gossipy details in this heteronymous memoir, only the cerebral workings of a first-rate thinker on the dilemma of life. Full of fresh metaphors and unique perceptions, The Book of Disquiet can be casually scanned and read profitably even at random.-- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.

Booknews

The first English translation (by Alfred Mac Adam) of selections from the major prose work of Pessoa (1888-1935), the most important Portuguese man of letters of the 20th century, and often identified, along with Rilke and Yeats, as one of the greatest European poets of the century. Composed (under the heteronym of Bernardo Soares) of reveries and everyday impressions from the last two decades of Pessoa's life, The book of disquiet partakes of the genres of the intimate diary, prose poetry, and the descriptive narrative. Of inestimable importance. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

The private meditations of one of modern Portugal's most celebrated poets and critics, set down pseudonymously in the form of a journal spanning some 20 years. Pessoa (1888-1935) is not well known outside of Portugal. A bookkeeper and journalist, he lived quietly in Lisbon and published much of his poetry under assumed names. (The putative author of The Book of Disquiet is "Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon.") Although he was raised in South Africa and educated in English, Pessoa held that "my country is the Portuguese language"; this work shows the truth of that claim. It records with palpable clarity the inner life of an immensely gifted and unbelievably self-contained writer who moves through the daily world of offices and trams and restaurants with no apparent aim besides the description and re-creation of his thoughts. We are given a picture of extraordinary tedium and solitude, but the "fatigue" that the narrator complains of so frequently does not prevent him from breathing life into the most commonplace events and discerning the true wonder of familiar things. The cut of a woman's dress, for example, glimpsed in passing aboard a streetcar, becomes a reminder of human society: of the factory that produced it, the hands that sewed it, the inventories that recorded it, and the threads that wove it. A thunderstorm watched through an office window carries all the force and terror of an apocalypse. Throughout, the focus is constantly sharpened by the author's narrative restraint, which commands attention, and by his depth of vision, which rewards it. Profound and moving: a work of immense, quiet power.