Book Review: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Once in a blue moon comes a delightfully chaotic book that enchants as much as it frustrates, that heals as much as it scorches, and that soothes as much as it disturbs. Reading such a book in which thoughts, consciousness, and perceptions appear as fragments that do not combine to form a coherent whole, one is often left wondering how to make sense of it all. How should one come to grips with its determined melancholy, its breathtaking audacity, and its insistence that inaction, despair, and renunciation are the sine qua non of life? The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa is one such modern masterpiece.

The book is an aggregation of disparate diary entries that are abstract, dense, and at times, eccentric. For its entire four hundred pages it offers a philosophy of a melancholic life, a philosophy of dreaming, and a philosophy of art. The book is a disorderly collection - a fragmentary collection of tormented aphorisms, reflections, and musings in the form of diary entries found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. In passage after passage that are at once lyrical and haunting, he bares his brooding soul while lying awake through insomniac nights when incessant rain falls on the rooftops of his beloved Lisbon where he lives in a cheap, rented room with cracked walls owned by a loathsome landlady.

“Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it.”

Pessoa was a compulsive writer who penned his thoughts relentlessly, day and night, on whatever he could lay his hands upon – “…in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of envelops, on paper scraps, and the margins of his own earlier texts.” To add to the confusion, Pessoa wrote under different names that he chose to call “heteronyms” – fictional alter egos with their own distinct biographies, writing styles, personalities, political attitudes, and individual pet peeves. These jottings, largely hand written and mostly undated, presented a challenge to the publishers who took years to compile them together into a book structure.

The book records his meandering thoughts in which he constantly floats through flimsy boundaries that separate his real world from his dreams, his inaction from his thoughts, and his ambition from his weariness.

Pessoa’s art consisted of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, and horoscopes and assorted other texts that he wrote through more than four dozen invented heteronyms.

Pessoa wrote poetry and prose both and in an insightful passage explains the difference between the two:

“I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.”

After reading a few pages a day, readers would often find themselves adrift with thoughts on renunciation or solitude or tedium because, Pessoa ensnares you, seduces you, and grips you with his flights of imagination that are mesmerizing. When he talks about giving things up it is not because he doesn’t what them, but because he does. Can there be a more intriguing Gordian knot? Consider this:

“Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.”

Although he was a prolific writer, Pessoa published merely four books during his lifetime. He left behind more than 25,000 manuscripts and typed pages that are still being deciphered and catalogued by experts. Perhaps he felt there was something noble in not being published because in a rather prescient manner, this is what he writes about an unpublished writer:

“The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.”

Despite Pessoa’s assertion about noble virtues of a non-published writer, we are glad that Penguin has been updating its various editions from time to time as more and more material is getting deciphered. The literary world would have been a poorer place without this effort.