"The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The Book of Disquietude was various books (yet ultimately one book), with various authors (yet ultimately one author), and even the word disquietude changes meaning as time passes." In his introduction, he writes that "if Bernardo Soares does not measure up to the full Pessoa, neither are his diary writings the sum total of Disquietude, to which he was after all a johnny-come-lately. Richard Zenith, editor of a new Portuguese edition in 1998, took the option of presenting a single volume, as in his English translation of 1991. The second phase, more personal and diary-like, is the one credited to Bernardo Soares. However, António Quadros considers the first phase of the book to belong to Pessoa himself.
This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa's genius.Fernando Pessoa drinking a glass of wine in a Lisbon tavern in 1929. Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares - an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself - The Book of Disquiet is 'the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed', a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair a hymn to the streets and cafes of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century's most important writers. It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa's celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced.
Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century.
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