The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
This posthumous masterpiece is a unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs that comprise the "autobiography" of one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, and part descriptive narrative, The Book of Disquiet is an astonishing work that gives Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague. With captivating translation by Richard Zenith, this is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.
Publish Date
2002-12-31T00:00:00.000Z
2002-12-31T00:00:00.000Z
First Published in 1982
Goodreads rating
4.42
ISBN
9780811226936
Categories
Recommendations
6
Recommendations
This is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think, gets at the idea that the internet and the stories we follow are, to a lot of us, extremely important and exciting and meaningful, though really they are just a few changes of characters on a little screen somewhere. – source
2020-03-04T18:27:37.000Z
Some of my own favorite weird/strange/experimental/lingering-afterglow/niche novels:
Out (Natsuo Kirino)
Pym (Mat Johnson)
The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa)
Under the Skin (Faber)
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (Rieko Matsuura)
The Famished Road (Ben Okri)
Delicious Foods (Hannaham) – source2021-02-17T16:06:33.000Z
@Sime0nStylites @scrapegroat @TomChivers That's such a great book. Pessoa was properly bonkers. – source