Book reviewed: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (originally published in April 2024)

If you know next to nothing about Fernando Pessoa, most of the disquiet that you might experience with The Book of Disquiet will come from deciding what version of the text you should read. The English section at Lisbon’s Livraria Bertrand, the world’s oldest bookstore, has several editions of the work to choose from, and each one begins differently. It is as if the writer had written a few books that had nothing in common with each other and decided to give them the same name. The explanation is simple. The Book of Disquiet is not really a proper book and perhaps was never conceived as such. When Pessoa died in 1935, aged forty-seven, he left behind several trunks filled with some 30,000 pieces of paper. The Book of Disquiet, a diaristic work of reflections and observations, came from that treasure trove of writings. Fragmentary and unstructured, it was never completed, remaining forever a work in progress, and had to be put together by Pessoa scholars. As each editor who faced the unenviable task of bringing The Book of Disquiet to reading audiences had his own ideas about the best order in which to present it, a number of versions have been published.

I settled on The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and masterfully translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Advancing his own method to the madness in the editor’s note, Pizarro explains that the two parts of the book (“First Phase” and “Second Phase”) were written at different times of Pessoa’s life and should therefore appear in the order in which they were written, instead of being lumped together in a violent attempt at unification. I found this convincing enough — or perhaps I am just a sucker for complete editions. At checkout the cashiers offer to stamp your purchases, so anyone who ever picks up my copy of The Book of Disquiet will know it was bought at Livraria Bertrand. Tacky but cute.

Pessoa populated his literature with what he called “heteronyms” — a bit like alter egos, but not quite. Heteronyms were his literary identities endowed with their own names, biographies, and even writing styles. Some have suggested that Pessoa’s heteronyms were multiple facets of Pessoa’s personality, or perhaps they were Pessoa’s multiple personalities — take your pick. The Book of Disquiet features a full heteronym, Vicente Guedes (“Phase One”), and a “semi-heteronym” by the name of Bernardo Soares (the much longer “Phase Two”). Both are virtually interchangeable. Neither Guedes nor Soares is much of a character. The book has no proper characters, just like it has no plot or shape. The book has no point to speak of, really, which for Pessoa is just the point. “And I am offering you this book because I know it to be beautiful and useless,” the first pages reveal. Don’t say later you weren’t warned.

In the introduction to an anthology of short stories by Ambrose Bierce, Will Self proposes that the word most repeated throughout a text happens to carry a “psychic lode” (Bierce’s, according to Self, is “acclivity”). The word that jumps at the reader again and again in The Book of Disquiet is “stagnant,” though, as a translated word, it can only be an approximation. Stagnant are the skies and waters, ponds and clothes; stagnant is the state of Pessoa’s heteronyms. Self’s theory seems to be validated. Pessoa wrote at what was a stagnant time for Portugal and for Europe. One of the most powerful empires in its heyday, Portugal had been reduced to insignificance by the 20th century. It still clung to a number of colonies, the territorial legacy of its erstwhile grandeur, but they, too, would be lost in the coming decades. As for Europe, when Pessoa started working on The Book of Disquiet, it was about to plunge into a war from which it would never recover. Some intellectuals understood immediately what the war meant for the future of Europe. Resisting the mostly jubilatory pan-European mood, Grigory Landau, a lamentably unknown Russian thinker, wrote as early as 1914 that the First World War was a turning point for Europe and would usher in enervation and darkness. And so it did.

The portrait of Pessoa’s Man of Disquiet hangs in the same gallery as portraits of Huysmans’s des Esseintes, Svevo’s Zeno Cosini, Proust’s narrator, and other neurotics and neurasthenics spawned by the industrial world and so prominent in the literature of Pessoa’s age. He is a hypersensitive man whose febrile inner life produces exaggerated reactions to external stimuli and prevents him from adapting to his surroundings. His disquiet is a function of tedium and torpor. What is commonly held to be real life has no meaning or reality for the Man of Disquiet; it bores and fatigues him. The only life worth living is the one spent in the verdant terraces of one’s imagination. Any exertion for the benefit of the material world is pointless and will never measure up to its mental equivalent. That includes such acts as masturbation, which is supposedly more pleasant when it is imagined rather than put into practice. For the Man of Disquiet, life is so meaningless that even suicide is devoid of meaning, and so the narrator never ventures to do away with himself. Unmoored and alienated, he believes in no eternal verities. He believes in nothing, if only because he doesn’t know what it is he should believe in. Everything is perpetually tentative, to be doubted and contradicted. From a note by Guedes: “Shut yourself up in your ivory tower, but without slamming the door, for your ivory tower is you. And if anyone tells you this is false and absurd, don’t believe him.” But this nugget of wisdom — the book is full of them, and the one in question concerns the art of dreaming well — is instantly negated: “But don’t believe what I’m telling you either, because you shouldn’t believe anything.” In the last pages of the book, Soares says that to think and not to be is the true throne fit for a king, but just a few notes before that, he laments living too much on one’s imagination, since it apparently erodes one’s ability to imagine. This is not the person you want sitting next to you on a plane.

The Man of Disquiet lacks any ambition. In matters that require some effort — Pessoa’s heteronyms, however bored and fatigued, do have bills to pay — he relies on inertia. Soares knows he is underpaid for the intellectually undemanding work he performs at a fabrics company in the Baixa district, but he has no desire to improve his lot and is prepared to spend the rest of his life as a middling assistant bookkeeper in the Rua dos Douradores. He finds the idea of a more glorious destiny laughable; surveying his “personal Boulevard Saint-Germain” outside the office, just as a wealthy landowner next door spits out the window, he mocks himself: “Vicomte de Chateaubriand doing the accounts! Professor Amiel perched on a high royal stool! Comte Alfred de Vigny debiting the Grandela department store! Senancour in Rua dos Douradores!” The Man of Disquiet has no desire to marry (naturally — what can be more futile?) or even to court a woman. The odd time a young woman in the street catches his eye and awakens desire in him, ten paces on from his daydream the woman meets a man who is either her husband or lover. This is unfortunate — but the reader suspects the Man of Disquiet wouldn’t know what to do with her even if there were no man ten paces ahead. The few attachments he has importune him; if a friend must undergo surgery, the Man of Disquiet is troubled only because he is now obliged to visit him at the hospital. He feels sorry — not for the friend, but for his inability to feel sorry for the friend. Psychiatrists might have a word for all this.

Pessoa was a poet, and The Book of Disquiet is poetry in prose, lush, baroque, and downright purple. It doesn’t always work. Pessoa tends to test the boundaries of poetic license: “The alcohol of grand words and long sentences, which, like waves, rise with their rhythmic breathing and fall again smiling, ironic snakes of foam in the sad magnificence of the dark night.” Exhibit II: “In what tree-shaded mystery did our finest fantasies occur, fantasies which, in the real world, are so reminiscent of streams and cypresses and box hedges, but find no canopies for their cortèges except by dint of abstaining?” As with any poetic work, much gets lost in translation, though Margaret Jull Costa deserves a sculpture alongside Pessoa’s outside the A Brasiliera café for her trouble. The Portuguese language, sibilant and languorous, buoys you like waves, and, to the extent that it is possible, Jull Costa succeeds in transporting Pessoa’s magic into English. For when the purple prose does work, it is magical. This is from Note 75, in which the Man of Disquiet (Guedes) compares his imagination to a city in the Orient: “The crowds that multicolour its streets stand out against some kind of backdrop which is not somehow theirs, as if they were embroidered in yellow or red on the palest of blue satins . . . The sands of my non-existence were carpeted in intimate softness, and clouds of algae floated in my rivers like shadowy exhalations. Thus was I porticos in lost civilizations, febrile arabesques on dead friezes, ancient black stains on the curves of broken columns . . . Always near, though, was the hesitant noise of distant celebrations, endless processions passing beneath my windows; but no dark goldfish swam in my ponds, no fruit grew among the still greenness of my orchards; not even the smoke from the chimneys of poor shacks where others live happily could lull to sleep with simple ballads the troubled mystery of my soul.”

Try sending the following text, which is my amalgam of two notes from Phase One, to a woman you love: “How could I not dream you? How could I not? Our Lady of the Hours that Pass, Madonna of stagnant waters and dead algae, Tutelary Goddess of vast deserts and dark landscapes of barren rocks . . . Opium of all silences, Lyre never to be plucked, Stained-glass Window of distance and abandon . . . Dulcimer of Extreme Unction, touchless Caress, Dove lying dead in the shadows, Balm of hours spent sleeping . . . Lyre fading at evening, Coffer of withered roses, Silence between prayer and prayer . . . Silent Tower of my desires . . . How it grieves me . . . not to be able to hold you up to the eyes of my dream like the Topsy-turvy-Dawn of the unreal sex of those angels who never got into heaven!” The woman might fall for you there and then; she might also think you are crazy and flee (and if she responds with a bovine “Huh?”, perhaps you should be the one to flee). A lot of the verbiage is consciously over the top, yet, at its best, it is exquisite and enchanting.

The description on the back of my copy promises the reader a “hymn to the streets and cafés of 1930s Lisbon.” It is nothing of the kind. Pessoa’s Lisbon is dreamy, spectral, and uninhabited by real people; it is a Lisbon born entirely of his crepuscular mind. One wonders how a southern city like Lisbon could have produced a man so susceptible to melancholy and tedium. Lively and charming, with dainty buildings and slender palm trees, the Portuguese capital is the antithesis of disquiet. Like all southern cities, it wears its history lightly. Standing in the Praça do Comércio, one fails to conjure the royal palace that once stood here and was destroyed by a tsunami in the Great Earthquake of 1755. Even the skeletal carapace of the Carmo Convent that juts out prominently from the hill of the Chiado district, left as a reminder of the calamity, does not awaken any ghosts in one’s mind. Taking in the city’s colorful roofs, the sun spilling over the Tejo, the yellow trams clambering up the steep streets, the hills dotted with streaks of lights at night, one wonders what went on in Pessoa’s head a century ago.

But then, while Lisbon is a southern city, it is not a Mediterranean one. It is the westernmost capital in continental Europe, and in Sintra, a short train ride from Lisbon, you can see the Atlantic Ocean if you ascend to the top of an appropriately high vantage point. In a way, Lisbon is the end of Europe, the end of the Old World, and a sort of finality is reached here. The brusque changes in topography that you experience with the hills of Lisbon force you to confront changeability and multiple perspectives; you are deprived of the certainties of a plain terrain. Should you find yourself alone in a deserted street on one of the hills, preferably at dusk and at the end of a rainy day, when the sky has spent itself but not yet cleared, and the city is submerged in a bluish twilight that makes it tentative and dreamy, Pessoa will become a lot more understandable, and so will the longing that permeates The Book of Disquiet, a metaphysical longing for something that cannot be possessed and may not even exist.

But the feeling is fleeting and transient, and one parts with it the way I parted with Pessoa’s book — with unmitigated relief. Marked by the time in which it was written, The Book of Disquiet is less an acquired taste than a taste that is never acquired, at least for this reader. Not that I am inclined to judge it. We do not put dreams on trial or submit them to audits. We don’t review them, either. As for the men who dream them, I am reminded of what T.E. Lawrence famously wrote in this connection. While all men dream, they don’t dream equally. Those who dream at night wake up to find their dreams mere vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous because they might act their dreams with open eyes. Thus T.E. Lawrence. Pessoa’s Man of Disquiet dreams both at night and by day, but is unable to act any of it, and it is this impotence that leads to his disquiet and tragic predicament. He endangers only himself — his dreams are not transferable and, fortunately for the reader, neither is his disquiet.