The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition (Serpent's Tail Classics)

by Fernando Pessoa

Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

In the middle of the conversations with myself that make up this book, I often feel a sudden need to talk to someone else, so I address the light hovering, as it does now, above the roofs of houses...' Seated at his desk in the Lisbon's Rua Dos Douradores, Bernardo Soares, an assistant book-keeper, writes his diary - a self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of his feelings and the humdrum reality of his everyday life. This is the first translation of a classic of existential literature - a book acknowledged by the critics as 'the most beautiful diary of the century.

• ISBN10: 178125866X
• ISBN13: 9781781258668
• Publish Date: 17 August 2017 (first published 28 May 1991)
• Publish Status: Cancelled
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Serpent's Tail
• Edition: Export/Airside
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 448
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

DNF.

God, this was awful.

I wanted to punch that hateful little shit of a narrator/main character on the nose within the first ten pages of the book.

I get that the cynicism is an expression of the guy's struggle to find something to value in his life, but that doesn't make him a metaphor of the modern literary hero or indeed anything I can value.

Apparently, a lot of people have found some deep insights in his ramblings. Good on them. To me, the narrator's (or Pessoa's??) ignorant, arrogant, disdainful stream-of-consciousness blether held more cliches than a piece of hackneyed journalism, signifying nothing.

And if the intro to the book is correct and the MC is an alter ego of Pessoa himslef (who hadn't actually published this in his lifetime), then that is rather sad.