The Book of Disquiet

November 11, 2002
When Pessoa died in 1935, a few years short of 50, he left behind a trunk of mostly unpublished writing in a variety of languages; his Lisbon publishers and variously translators are still sifting them. This perpetually unclassifiable and unfinished book of self-reflective fragments was first published in Portuguese in 1982, and it is arguably Pessoa's masterpiece. Four previous English translations, all published in 1991, were compromised either by abridgement, poor translation or error-laden source texts. While he's now a Pessoa veteran—having edited and translated Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation winner—Zenith's first pass at this book was one of the four misses. He bases this new translation on his own Portuguese edition of 1998, and has done an admirable job in bringing out the force and clarity in Pessoa's serpentine and sometimes opaque meditations. Pessoa often wrote as various personae (as Pessoa & Co.
carefully demonstrated); Disquiet
is no exception, being putatively the work of "Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon." Thus it is impossible to ascribe the book's anti-humanist logophilia directly to the author: "I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry." That is just one of many permutations of similar sentiments, but the genius of Pessoa and his personae is that readers are left weighing each and every such sentence for sincerity and truth value. (Dec. 3)Forecast:The release of this book as part of the newly redesigned Penguin Classics series should further assure Pessoa's place in the modernist pantheon.
Pessoa and Co. was well reviewed, but the fact that
Disquiet's previous appearances in English were relatively recent may limit review attention.

Starred review from July 3, 2017
Reviewed by Marcela Valdes A triumph of scholarship and translation, this collaboration between editor Pizarro and translator Jull Costa presents in English one of the greatest works of Portuguese fiction in its entirety for the first time. Composed mostly on the eve and during the aftermath of World War I, The Book of Disquiet looks movingly at inertia and refusal; it’s the Portuguese cousin of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Waiting for Godot.First published in 1982, 47 years after Pessoa’s death, The Book of Disquiet presents a series of “random impressions,” diarylike passages that double as articulations of personal philosophy. Arranging these fragments chronologically for the first time, Pizarro reveals that Pessoa composed them in the voices of two distinct characters: the office clerk Vicente Guedes and the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares.Pessoa wrote Guedes’s section first, and it’s easy to see why these earlier texts, which date from 1913 to 1920, have been left out or buried among Soares’s entries in previous editions of the novel. Guedes is all preening self-absorption and jejune metaphysics; he’s like an introverted version of Dadaist Tristan Tzara. “I want your reading of this book to leave you with the sense of having lived through some voluptuous nightmare,” he declares.Pessoa himself planned a “rigorous” pruning and revision of Guedes’s droning that never occurred, and newcomers to The Book of Disquiet should consider skipping straight to Soares’s half. This is the text that has earned the novel’s standing as Pessoa’s pièce de resistance. Where Guedes imagines himself a gifted dreamer trapped in a prison cell, Soares wryly likens himself to a “little girl embroidering pillowcases” to pass the time. This is more than a difference in tone; Soares sees an existential fraternity that Guedes does not. Sitting in his “pokey office,” he recognizes himself as one of many people who make their way through life with “sad, exalted hearts.” He notes: “I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress.... The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write.”Embroidering the skies and streets of Lisbon, and his own interior moodscapes, into words is the one comfort left to an orphan who has witnessed “so many noble ideas fallen onto the dungheap.” Jull Costa, who first took a crack at The Book of Disquiet early in her career, gorgeously renders Soares’s melancholy descriptions. In a novel almost entirely stripped of plot and secondary characters, the fresh translation of these exquisite scenes is everything.Pessoa created more than 70 authorial characters, or “heteronyms,” over his lifetime, but Soares was the one most similar to the author. His final entries were composed in 1934, a year before Pessoa’s death. Through Soares, we can begin to fathom why Pessoa produced trunks full of manuscripts that were published only after he died. Pursuing anything in this world is folly, Soares thinks, but “to know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about.”Marcela Valdes is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a former board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

January 13, 2003
Sussman's accomplished first thriller mixes an ancient legend of an invading Persian army swallowed up by a sandstorm in the Egyptian desert with the explosive politics of modern Egypt. London zoologist Tara Mullray comes to the pyramids at Saqqara to visit her father, a prominent archeologist. She finds him slumped dead in his apartment, apparently of natural causes. He has left his daughter an ancient, much-coveted wall fragment that he discovered, covered with hieroglyphics that may reveal the long-concealed site where the lost Persian army perished. The site would be not only an archeological gold mine but an incredibly valuable store of ancient treasure. Many shady characters are after the wall fragment, and Tara is caught up in a swirl of intrigue involving a malevolent Islamic fundamentalist leader, Sayf-al-Tha'r, who wants an Egypt freed of foreigners, and his associate, Dr. Dravic, a greedy, unscrupulous German professor. Helping her navigate the shadowy local politics is Daniel Lecage, an archeologist and former lover who left her for his other love, Egypt. She's also aided by Yusuf Khalifa, a thoughtful police inspector whose beloved older brother joined Sayf-al-Tha'r's radicals and was eventually killed by them. Sussman, who works on excavations in Egypt, has created a textured, well-researched and expertly paced debut. As the murders and thrills accumulate, the story veers toward melodrama, but the truly inventive plot twists come along at such a fast clip that readers won't mind.

April 29, 1991
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.

March 2, 1992
A better title might be The Books of Disquiet . Each entry in this fictional diary of one Bernardo Soares represents an attempt to create a distinct biography, for Soares lives according to the maxim: ``Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.'' Through every rumination he records Soares longs to father someone because he is ``nobody, absolutely nobody.'' His monotonous work as a bookkeeper in a Lisbon office and his solitary, celibate existence have contributed to the dissolution of his identity. Yet this grants him the ultimate imaginative freedom: ``Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything.'' One effect of this freedom is a sense of exhaustion before the sheer number of possibilities for being. Another is a sense--at once paternal and disturbingly erotic--of intimacy with the whole human race. Of sleep Soares muses: ``When someone sleeps they become a child. . . . I experience an immense, boundless tenderness for all of infantile humanity.'' More elegantly translated here than in the recent Pantheon edition, this novel presents paradoxes of identity that are more than just an occasion for meditation for Pessoa (1888-1935), one of Portugal's greatest writers and among this century's most enigmatic. They parallel Pessoa's own lived experience. He created several distinct personalities--called ``heteronyms''--through which he wrote in an astonishing variety of styles and even in different languages. Soares represents a ``semiheteronym,'' perhaps closest of all to the ``real'' Pessoa. Whoever Pessoa was, he managed to address through Soares's abstruse, at times excruciatingly precious musings the essential condition of human identity as represented in Western literature. Soares's separation from a common order might be the stuff of tragedy but for the fact that ``my self-imposed rupture with any contact with things, led me precisely to what I was trying to flee.'' For all his quixotic tilting at windmills, Soares admits: ``Whenever I see the figure of a young girl in the street . . . I wonder, however idly, how it would be if she were mine.'' Yet Sancho Panza's suit never hangs on Soares's skinny bones, and this is his dilemma. He is stalled between the poles of tragedy and comedy: ``I can be neither nothing nor everything: I'm just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.'' And herein lies the reason for the multifarious forms of his--and our--disquiet.