Diary
The Book of Disquiet
Livro do Desassossego
Fernando Pessoa · 1982
Synopsis
Bernardo Soares is an assistant bookkeeper in an office on the Rua dos Douradores, in Lisbon, and lodges in a room on the same street. He goes there, comes back, goes up to his room. Nothing happens to him and he does not wish that anything should. He dreams, theorises about his dreams, looks at the city he loves, and keeps this undated notebook, an autobiography without events, like a diary from which the days have been removed.
Context
The book did not exist in its author's lifetime; he had published only a few extracts in reviews, among them Na Floresta do Alheamento. The fragments, marked L. do D., lay in the trunk holding his papers, and the whole did not appear until 1982, nearly half a century after his death, through the efforts of Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Maria Aliete Galhoz and Teresa Sobral Cunha. Its successive editors have proposed competing arrangements, so that no two readers ever read quite the same book. Its author regarded Soares as a semi-heteronym: not a personality other than his own, but a mere mutilation of it.
Who it is for
Fragments in no fixed order, to be read in small quantities. The editions differ in their arrangement.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the great books of modern prose; its publication made Pessoa known throughout the world, and João Botelho made a film from it in 2010.
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