The book of disquiet

Description

Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is a modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time. This complete and unabridged edition – published in Penguin Modern Classics – is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith

‘The best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever’ – The Guardian

*Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation*

‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist,’ – so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the ‘heteronyms’, fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative ‘factless autobiography’ of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and narrative, creating one of the greatest – but also the strangest – modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes-linked fragments, The Book of Disquiet is a mesmerising, haunting ‘novel’ without parallel in any other culture.

This edition includes notes on the reconstruction of the text, appendices containing material omitted from the final version and letters which Pessoa intended to incorporate into the text. This edition also includes a table of the ‘heteronyms’ used by Pessoa in his writing.

Fernando Pessoa (1888- 1935) was born in Lisbon but went to live in Durban, South Africa, at the age of seven. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer who ascribed much of his work to a variety of personas, or heteronyms, Pessoa published relatively little of his vast output and supported himself by writing letters in English for import- export firms. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.

Richard Zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, researcher and translator. He has edited and translated many works by Fernando Pessoa, including A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe – Selected Poems. His Pessoa: An Experimental Life was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.