The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Pessoa, Fernando

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024120013X ISBN 13: 9780241200131

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2015

Synopsis

With its astounding hardcover reviews Richard Zenith's new complete translation of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET has now taken on a similar iconic status to ULYSSES, THE TRIAL or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as one of the greatest but also strangest modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes linked fragments, it is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.

About this title

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 024120013X
• ISBN 13: 9780241200131
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Zenith Richard