The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa (or Bernardo Soares)

What a book! Reading it has become a bit of a yearly tradition for me. I have a Spanish edition (translated by Ángel Crespo) which was a gift to me from someone very special. I haven't read it fully in English (yet) and my Portuguese is unfortunately not good enough to read the book in its original language. I have so many feelings about The Book of Disquiet that I'd like to share, but I should start off by saying that this is not a conventional novel with a plot. Rather, it is a collection of fragments compiled over several years and attributed to Pessoa's heteronym Bernardo Soares. They read like private journal entries and touch on a variety of ideas and topics. Pessoa himself referred to the book as a "factless autobiography".

There are moments where Pessoa finds the universe contained within the most mundane and every-day scenarios (on one occasion he experiences the entirety of life while sitting in a streetcar, on another a waiter at a café inspires thoughts on the nature of language and being, he has a mystical experience where he "finds" himself while walking down some steps to a beach). For me, one of the most striking themes in the book was Pessoa's explorations of the self, specifically of the fragmented self. Throughout the book he consistently refers to the self as a place which can be visited and explored, or as a collection of very distinct selves—a type of "pantheism" of the self wherein the self is the substance of an entire inner world of beings, peoples, landscapes. In true Pessoan fashion (ironic and paradoxical), however, he also insists on his non-existence.

Pessoa showcases his preference for fiction over reality throughout this book, the latter oftentimes being more real than the former for him. I found this particularly interesting given his real-life (if such a term can be applied) interest in the occult. For him, some of his fictional heteronyms were real entities that he had actually encountered. The Book of Disquiet was not written by the "real" Pessoa, but by Bernardo Soares—a semi-real Pessoa (keep in mind that pessoa is, funnily enough, Portuguese for person). It's difficult to disentangle Pessoa from his literature, and perhaps this was one of his main points. There's a fragment where he describes life as something akin to a great work of literature into which all of our individual narratives are woven together.

Throughout the book there are moments of profound inspiration ("I am the size of what I see, and not the size of my own stature") and moments of deep loneliness, pain, and ennui. The fragments can stir up wonder, sadness, a sense of tragedy and helplessness, absurdity, and even humour—sometimes all at once. Here's one of the quotes which, in my view, best exemplifies this: "Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realised that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody."

Finally, there are fragments which I fail to understand no matter how many times I read them, and yet, reading them is in itself an aesthetic experience. There are lines whose meaning eludes me completely but from which I can extract so much delicate and sophisticated beauty. I don't know how to interpret these fragments, but I think they are the literary equivalent of a painter's studies, making use of the palette of language and grammar to create some of the most beautiful prose poetry I've read.

Every time I've read this book I've gotten something different out of it. Like its author, it is a book that's made up of broken pieces brought together to make something unique. As 2025 begins, I'm waiting for the right moment to pick this book up again and have new experiences reading it.