The Book of Disquiet

Name: The Book of Disquiet
Author: Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa · 1982

Not a conventional novel. A fragment-diary of a fictional heteronym (Bernardo Soares), assembled from thousands of scraps found in a trunk after Pessoa's death in 1935. Published in 1982. A meditation on consciousness, anonymity, and the beauty of things never done. There is nothing else like it in world literature.

The case against

on the self-pity
“the entries seem less like profound soul searching and more like adolescent whining”
a book blog
on the shortest sections
“the shortest sections, sometimes no more than a sentence or two, can be intellectually daunting”
Bradley Babendir · Electric Literature, 2017
on the prose style
“I often could not recognize how the sentence had been introduced”
a Substack review
on the gloom
“why one should spend one’s Sunday afternoon indulging such lugubriosity, such self-involvement”
a Substack review