Why read The Book of Disquiet?

Book cover of The Book of Disquiet

Book description

A modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so…

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Lisbon

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Book of Disquiet as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

B.W. Powe

Author

Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet—original, counter, spare, strange—is not like anyone’s book, truly, in its mix of prose poetry, reflections, impressions, descriptions of psychic states and the city of Lisbon. I’d say read it to remind you of how hauntingly elliptical and daring a book can be.

I love it for its mysterious quality—how it evokes, invokes moods—how it stays ahead of you—always inviting you to come back to it. It taught me to welcome the unfinished and fragmentary, the evasive and the atmospheric, the creation of new identities in a book, that enigma and precise description can exist…

From B.W.'s list on vistas and fantasias of the subconscious.