About this title: When Fernando Pessoa died in 1935 he left behind a trunk containing over 25,000 items a vast collection of poems, fragments, letters, journals. These pieces were ascribed to a variety of writers - the heteronyms or assumed identities Pessoa had created over the course of his extravagant written life. Attributed to the heteronym Bernado Soares, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET is perhaps best described as an 'anti-literature'. Written in exquisite, painful detail, this is a collection of fragments, an 'autobiography of one who never lived'. Richard Zenith has drawn on his own intimate knowledge of the ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Date Published: 1992
ISBN-13:9781852422042ISBN:1852422041
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Clean and clear throughout. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 324 p. Extraordinary Classics. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Serpents Tail
Date Published: 2002-11-01
ISBN-13:9781852427580ISBN:1852427582
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781852427580. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Date Published: 2003-01-01
ISBN-13:9780141183046ISBN:0141183047
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780141183046. read more
Description: Good. Ships from the UK. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Your purchase also supports literacy charities. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9780141183046ISBN:0141183047
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679402343ISBN:0679402349
Description: Good. Used item may show library stamps, stickers and marks. Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: orig. boards
Publisher: Pantheon Books, New York
Date Published: (1991)
Description: Minor rubbing. VG., dustwrapper. 22x14cm, xxxvi, 278 pp., First American edition. Translation of: O livro do desassossego. Translated from the Portuguese by Alfred Mac Adam. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon Books, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679402343ISBN:0679402349
Description: Very Good+ in Very Good+ jacket. First U.S. edition, hardcover, touch of soiling to page edges, couple of pages with tiny dog-ears to bottom corner, some fading to edges of boards, otherwise a VG+ copy in like dustjacket which has some light sunning to the spine and front panel. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Date Published: 2002
ISBN-13:9781852427580ISBN:1852427582
Description: New. 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. read more
"Fernando Pessoa é inegavelmente um dos mestres da poesia universal. Seus heterônimos encantam pela multiplicidade e possibilidades de desdobramentos humanos, pelos estilos criados e recriados em cada personalidade misteriosa que surge a cada vez que um novo escrito seu é descoberto. O livro do desassossego é um dos livros mais intensos e perfeitos com os quais tive contato ao longo de minha vida de leitor. É arrebatador, poético, humano... Cada linha desvela um pouco do que somos todos nós. Nossa angústias, medos, a solidão, as relações humanas, o passar do tempo, as incertezas da vida... Escrito em prosa-poética é considerado um dos mais importantes livros de Fernando Pessoa. Recomendação em alto estilo!"
"Reading The Book of Disquiet is like taking a long, meandering (though not leisurely) walk through a dark and desolate park, passing scrawny trees with ashen daylight overhead, stopping dry stone fountains or splintering benches to examine beetles or scratches in the dust, conversing with no one (if there is anyone), yet painstakingly constructing the same sentences over and over in your head, building them and taking them apart again, building and taking them apart again, continuing to amble, to put one foot in front of the other, knowing that there is no exit, nor was there an entrance, and when crossing paths with a disheveled, prancing crow, you realize that you know and always have and always will know that the park is the mental landscape of a man pretending to be another man pretending not to exist--or rather, trying--and that you have seen this gangly flying creature before."
"This may be the greatest diary ever written. Learning that this was a planned book from Pessoa is a bit upsetting. The constant repetition destroys the pace. He has a few moments of brilliance, well actually quite a few moments of brilliance, but that is stamped out by the droll passages where he just talks about how dreams are better than action. Huh? Well, I always believed that art should be as much of a real, kinetic undertaking as solemn contemplation. But Pessoa doesn't even want to get out of his chair. I wonder if he had some sort of physical ailment. There were so many times when he stated his preference towards dreams, but overall, it makes him look like an amateur. I would recommend it, if someone were to strip it of redundancy. Yet, the guy really is the most peculiar writer that Europe has produced. A hermit trapped in a great city, he had virtually no one to emphasize with. He seems completely disconnected from women as well, that is, if he was playing for that team (I think he played for neither team - a true outcast). I'll read The Education of the Stoic in a few months and see if I don't get annoyed too quickly. He also mentioned Antonio Nobre (who he said wrote the saddest book in his language), a Portuguese poet who I sadly learned has had no work translated (and published) into English. There's a collection of his poems called "Só (Alone)", but you'll have to know the language to enjoy it."
I am free and lost. I feel. I have fever, chills. I am myself.
In Pessoa I have made a lifelong friend. Rarely do I find an author who speaks to my wild adoration of words as well as my spiritual hunger. The word "spiritual" does not even really say it, it is the unveiling of things as they are, and the raw bare telling of it. My last big love was an unsettled scribbling philosopher who used to write things like "Everything is ourselves and we are everything, but of what use is it, if everything is nothing?" (47) and reading his seemingly nonsensical rants I would scoff. Then I started doing some serious work and met some real teachers and everywhere began hearing the same thing: this life is a dream. We are caught in the illusion. Everything and everyone we see is a reflection of ourselves. A projection of our minds. We are the creators of everything we experience. True self is no self. We are everything, we are nothing, indeed.
"Whenever I see someone sleep, I remember that everything is asleep. Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he ever thought he did anything but dream" (81)
Pessoa's insistence on dreams, the very literal dream-quality of existence, the awareness of our everyday disguises in the clothing of identity, the happiest hours of no-thought, his acutely detached observations of the unconscious humans around him-all of these reveal a being who is awake in the dream. He states that he never had anyone he could call "Master" (67), but somehow, at some point probably early in his life, the curtain of illusion was yanked back to expose Reality. No wonder then that he spent the majority of his life in solitude, connected but not relating to his fellow humans. Writing, I suspect, created outlet and purpose, and of course companionship, in a life alienated from the ignorant dramas and delusions of the sleeping world. He was not, however, enlightened/released from suffering; or maybe he was, who knows? Either way, he succeeded in conveying both a vivid and undeniable appreciation of life, and an abysmal yet matter-of-fact longing for death. To see things as they are and continue to be: I'm sure this must have been a challenge. But Pessoa renewed my faith in the possibility of communicating the unreligious ineffability of waking up, of seeing through the illusion of separation, doubt and fear which surrounds us. Without sentimentality or agenda. Simply to express, to create, to pass on a written artifact of understanding for those, like me, to come across and treasure."
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