Features

1.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009

The book as it came to me was drab, bound in pale green cloth and devoid of all markings save for its title printed in gold: The Book of Disquiet. That starkness of labeling was its first appeal. The second was the rhythmic name of its author, written on the inside flap, falling drop-like as water when recited—Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa. The strange resonance between his middle name and my last was a trivial comfort, but an attractive one. It sustained me through the unsettling pages, from the very moment I opened to page one (a convenient place) and began.

To begin—a tremulous thing in the case of Pessoa. Now thought of as a definitive part of the Portuguese literary canon and one of the greatest poets of existential malaise of the twentieth century, Pessoa was once considered a minor figure, known mostly for founding the modernist literary journal Orpheu. Following his death in 1935, however, his sister shocked scholars by revealing the existence of a trunk containing over twenty-thousand of his documents—poems, plays, essays, even horoscopes—mostly unfinished and all but indecipherable. The subsequent frenzy of academic attempts to arrange the hundreds of disorganized journal entries into something linear could conceivably have assumed countless forms. It is entirely possible that my copy of Pessoa’s text places later entries at the front of the book, so that instead of edging toward death, his insights crawl toward natality.

The actual content of these enigmatic pages too defies a narrative arc. Pessoa presents his reader with the despairing and fragmentary diary of an assistant book-keeper who has resigned himself to never leaving his street, choosing instead to dwell in his mind. “With the soul’s equivalent of a wry smile,” he writes, “I calmly confront the prospect that my life will consist of nothing more than being shut up forever in Rua dos Douradores, in this office, surrounded by these people.” But the peculiar quality of “forever” is that it has neither a beginning nor an end. The entries—brilliant in their philosophical reflections though they are—thus retain a kind of sameness, existing outside the normal relationship of cause and effect. I could have started from page 38 or 217 with just as much reason or sense.

One final matter complicates this strange, non-linear text. Though it is born of Pessoa’s mind, he himself does not claim authorship. The writer of the diary, according to Pessoa, is instead one Bernardo Soares, a tall hunched man with a penchant for cheap tobacco, whom he encounters on the upper floor of a Lisbon café. Soares is one of Pessoa’s literary personalities, which he calls “heteronyms”—alternate personae with different biographies and philosophies, all coexisting within his fertile imagination, of whom we today count more than seventy-two. In his work they interact, reading one another’s writings, producing critiques, even penning obituaries. A poignant addition, for if imaginary characters seem to me easily created, then their deaths are all the more painful, a first killing of consciousness that precedes their second demise when, inevitably, the page is turned.

2.

Leningrad, Russia, 1948

The book I requested has finally arrived. I can still see the messenger scurrying away over the new snow. Cowards that they are, they wrapped it in black paper—as if that will keep away any eyes that care to see! In any case, I will write this review. I will do so in spite of myself, because I have no wish to and because nobody cares a thing for my pitiful attempts at opposition anyway. If this sounds like a contradiction, that is because it is, but my review will be about Fernando Pessoa and thus contradiction is entirely the point.

Pessoa’s works are plump with oppositions, rife with challenges. Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis—those other, famous characters of his—remain offstage in this particular book; but Soares is a lonely man, and so he seeks the chatter of contradiction within himself. Reality, without reason, appears one way for him as he sits in his office, completely another when he is caught in a rainstorm a few pages later.