Its pages, like Pessoa’s trunk, are thick with thoughts. The Book of Disquiet is caught up in the steady drumbeat of ordinary life and all its detritus: a favorite pair of boots, a type of pant that’s in fashion, the way people in Lisbon pronounce Trás-os-Montes, but most of all the ordinary noise of the self thinking about itself. There is something necessarily prosaic about them. Lyrical, poetic-but to call these paragraphs prose poems would be misleading. Nobody can render the the hollowed horror of a world wrung out quite as gorgeously as Pessoa. Arguably, the four greatest poets in the Portuguese language were all Pessoa using different names. Pessoa’s work The Book of Disquiet is one of life’s great miracles. Max Nelson - The New York Review of Books One of the central figures of European modernism. A modern masterpiece.Īs addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino. The ultimate futility of all accomplishment, the fascination of loneliness, the way sorrow colors our perception of the world: Pessoa’s insight into his favorite themes was purchased at a high price, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Marcela Valdes - Publisher Weekly (Starred Review)
A triumph of scholarship and translation.
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