Review by Choice Review
This major prose work by the great European modernist Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), waited 50 years to appear in Portuguese while existing as disperse prose scraps and fragments in the famous trunk containing Pessoa's literary archive. Potentially a confession, memoir, or biography consisting of more than 500 fragments, the book defied completion. Purportedly the diary of a heteronymic personality named Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, the work remained formless, indeterminate. Its self-rejection and resistance to form are among the quintessentially modernist qualities that make of it the most ineluctable modality of European modernism. Any published form, and there have been three major Portuguese editions, is necessarily tentative and a betrayal of the indeterminate order and elusive authorship of the "non-existent" original. Following Spanish and Italian translations (1984, 1986), no fewer than three English translations, all necessarily different, appeared in 1991 by three different translators. Alfred Mac Adam's translation, reviewed here, is a selected anthology of 276 fragments from the 1982 Portuguese edition, with a critical preface cum biography (without notes or bibliography), a selected list of Pessoa's work in English, and chronology of his life and times. Pessoa readers will want to have all English translations, especially the complete, scholarly Carcanet Press edition translated by Richard Zenith (Manchester 1991). A third translation of the text as edited by Maria Jos'e de Lancastre is by Margaret Jull Costa (London, 1991). Recommended for general readers, upper-division and graduate collections of contemporary European fiction.-K. D. Jackson, Yale University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
"Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is Portugal's major twentieth-century writer, the greatest representative of the modernist sensibility his nation produced. He is not widely known in the English-speaking world, probably because he is a poet," writes Alfred MacAdam in his introduction to the journal that Pessoa kept from 1913 to his death. Pessoa's reveries and philosophical observations contain little observation of places, events, or human interaction. Pessoa, a solitary who rejected the senses, spends a great deal of time doing something that closely resembles whining. And he sure does go on about his superiority to the insufficiently sensitive run of humanity. (His readers excepted, of course.) Still, he is an almost textbook modernist when he explores multiple selves, social isolation, the preeminent value of art and dreams and myth and reading and writing. And as his brooding passages on nature attest, he is a born writer. A necessary addition to every collection of mod~ernist literature. ~--Roland Wulbert
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
