Cocaine Pages discussion

Group read thread for the August read of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa



Several Editions:

Description: Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."

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.


People tend to agree that this book is a literature masterpiece/treasure. Let's hear your verdict!

I'll be starting this next week. I've only read the Introduction and it looks promising. A lot of love for Pessoa here on GR, so I'm pretty excited about it.

Here's a quote from the Introduction, written by the translator:

The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine – this was the closest thing to a message that Pessoa left, and he gave us Bernardo Soares to show us how it’s done.

How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By performing our daily duties but living, simultaneously, in the imagination. Travelling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination.

Okay, so I've read it. Wrote a long ass review about it too because apparently I have nothing better to do and wasting time is so damn cool.

Anyway, I didn't like The Book of Disquiet. It's fascinating how Pessoa lived his life, inventing a multitude of false selves, each with their own history, personality and dreams, and existing somewhat schizophrenically through them.

However, the book is just the tedious musings of one of Pessoa’s heteronyms, assistant bookkeeper Bernando Soares, a lonely nobody with a superiority complex, determined to record every drop of rain Lisbon, arguably the sunniest city in Europe, has ever seen. The whole thing is tiresome, trite and redundant. There's no substance to Soares' pseudo-philosophy, his voice is jarring, and he has a definite opinion about everything, especially things he hasn’t seen/experienced, and he doesn’t shy away from giving naive advice, thus rendering himself gravely insufferable. He is also a self-proclaimed genius, sadly with nothing to back this up.