Review by Booklist Review
Fernando Pessoa (1888--1935), the Portuguese poet, translator, and publisher, may remain underappreciated and less known than many of his early-twentieth-century literary contemporaries, yet, as Zenith, who has brilliantly translated Pessoa's work, masterfully demonstrates in his engaging and comprehensive study, Pessoa surely ranks among the most fascinating and enigmatic. Pessoa was a voracious reader from an early age and soon began creating his own characters, or heteronyms, aliases that were more akin to alternate identities because Pessoa provided complete biographies for them. Pessoa created dozens of heteronyms and published works under these varying personalities, in order to be "plural like the universe." As Zenith notes, Portugal's "four greatest poets of the twentieth century were Fernando Pessoa." Pessoa had a keen interest in the occult and alchemy, which provides a metaphor for his obsession with continuously transforming himself. He was notoriously private, likely died a virgin, and spent a lifetime seeking psychiatric insights into human nature and the concept of genius. Zenith's monumental achievement--delving into literary, cultural, and political history and performing astute analysis of Pessoa's oeuvre--is the result of reading every poem, letter, and scrap of paper that Pessoa wrote, some kept in trunks and only discovered posthumously. This is not only the definitive life of Pessoa but also a model for the art of biography.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888--1935) contained a multitude of adventurous personalities despite his staid lifestyle, according to translator Zenith (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa) in this gloriously labyrinthine biography. Zenith recaps the outwardly uneventful existence of Pessoa, who published only a fraction of his writing before his death, had one brief romance, extolled the virtue of "doing nothing in life," and ended one of his last poems with the summation, "Give me more wine, because life is nothing." But while Pessoa may have been light on worldly experience, Zenith proves he had an exuberant intellectual life that played out through the various pen-name personae he used to adopt radically diverging poetic styles, explore homoerotic themes, invent literary movements--including "sensationism" and "swampism"--and mock himself in print. Zenith elegantly conveys Pessoa's eccentricity (he immersed himself in astrology and spiritualism and exasperated his girlfriend by impersonating his diffident alter ego Álvaro de Campos on dates) while making him an exemplar of the fragmented consciousness of a modernity that has "disabused us of whatever harmonious wholes we once cherished." Zenith's dynamic prose, deep erudition, and incisive readings of Pessoa's poetry make for a meticulous portrait of one artist's brilliant and bewildering inner world. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Zenith, through his translations and dedication to the work of writers like Fernando Pessoa, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, has become an English-language authority on Portuguese poetry. He now offers Anglophone readers an exhaustive biography of Pessoa (1888--1935), a poet best known for his intellectual style and use of heteronyms (literary personalities created with unique styles). Making use of personal interviews, correspondence, Pessoa's published and unpublished works, and, most notably, over 25,000 papers left by Pessoa in a wooden trunk that's now in the care of the National Library of Portugal, Zenith fastens a mysterious literary figure to history. His careful account does not exempt Pessoa from the bigotry of the early 20th century, but instead details how Pessoa's firsthand observations of European imperialism, young democracy, and the Great War influenced his work. In this extensively researched biography, Zenith's candid and questioning tone is refreshing and necessary to recognize moments of considerable uncertainty about Pessoa. Blending research with literary analysis, Zenith is quick to acknowledge when archives offer limited information. VERDICT Essential to academic collections, this biography is also accessible to general audiences interested in the potential of art that does not imitate life.--Asa Drake, Marion County P.L., FL
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A deep examination of an acclaimed literary figure. Award-winning translator, literary critic, and Guggenheim fellow Zenith draws on the published work and vast unpublished archive of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to produce a capacious, perceptive biography of the enigmatic Portuguese writer. Among Zenith's many sources is Pessoa's semiautobiographical The Book of Disquiet and some 25,000 manuscript sheets of poetry, plays, prose, philosophy, and literary criticism, many attributed to the multitude of invented authors that Pessoa created throughout his life. His desire, he said, "to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities," began in childhood and proliferated until he had imagined more than 100 distinct individuals. He imbued these personalities--he called them heteronyms--with complex biographies and often starkly different opinions and views of the world. Zenith prefaces the book with capsule biographies of dozens of the most significant heteronyms and offers an appendix featuring a detailed chronology of each one's appearance. In 1904, poet Charles Robert Anon emerged as a predominant alter ego; soon he was joined by Horace James Faber, a writer of detective stories. One heteronym was French; another, British. One was a psychiatrist whose client was Pessoa; others included a monk undergoing a crisis of faith, an astrologer, and a promoter of neopaganism. Among the most well known was Ricardo Reis, a poet immortalized by novelist José Saramago in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Pessoa, born in Lisbon (Zenith is a longtime resident), lived with his family in Durban, South Africa, until he was 17, when he returned to Portugal for college. He never married and "almost certainly died a virgin." A brief romantic relationship ended when Pessoa lost interest after about a year. Zenith delivers careful readings of Pessoa's works and examines with sensitivity his varied intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic proclivities as well as his longing for posthumous fame, which he amply accrued. Impressive research and evident enthusiasm inform a definitive biography. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
