The Book of Disquiet (Extraordinary Classics) - Softcover

Pessoa, Fernando

4.41

30,641 ratings by Goodreads

9781852422042: The Book of Disquiet (Extraordinary Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852422041 ISBN 13: 9781852422042

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 1991

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In the middle of the conversations with myself that make up this book, I often feel a sudden need to talk to someone else, so I address the light hovering, as it does now, above the roofs of houses...' Seated at his desk in the Lisbon's Rua Dos Douradores, Bernardo Soares, an assistant book-keeper, writes his diary - a self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of his feelings and the humdrum reality of his everyday life. This is the first translation of a classic of existential literature - a book acknowledged by the critics as 'the most beautiful diary of the century.

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Review:

?This book has moved me more than anything I have read in years. I have rarely encountered such exhilarating lugubriousness... A complete masterpiece, the sort of book one makes friends with and cannot bear to be parted with. Boredom informs it, but not boringly. Pessoa loved the minutiae of what we care to deem the ordinary life, and that love enriches and deepens his art. Paul Bailey, The Independent ?It could not have been written in England: there is too much thought racing hopelessly around. The elegance of the style, well conveyed in what seems to be a more than adequate translation, is an important component and a very ironic one. The diary disturbs from beginning to end? There is a distinguished mind at work beneath the totally acceptable dullness of clerking. The mind is that of Pessoa? Anthony Burgess, Observer

Many British reviewers have pegged Pessoa as a great long-lost modernist, but he also calls up echoes of Beckett's exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire; Melville's evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges; even the cranky hermeticism of Witold Gombrowicz (VLS)

It was a real bonus when Serpent's Tail published The Book of Disquiet, a meandering, melancholic series of reveries and meditations?Pessoa's amazing personality is as beguiling and mysterious as his unique poetic output. We cannot learn too much about him (William Boyd (TLS Books of the Year))

Book Description:

The definitive edition of the much-loved classic

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