The Book of Disquiet

Description

Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon and one of Fernando Pessoa’s semi-invented selves, observes office routines, city streets, dreams, boredom, and the instability of his own consciousness. No conventional plot gathers these pieces. Instead, melancholy diary entries, aphorisms, imagined scenes, and philosophical meditations create what Soares calls a factless autobiography: a record of inward life stripped of public achievement. Pessoa assembled the fragments over many years without fixing a final sequence, so repetition and contradiction become part of the experience. The book returns obsessively to solitude, identity, work, imagination, and the difficulty of acting in the world, making restlessness itself both its subject and its organizing form.

Themes