The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions.
Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death.
"As searing as Rilke or Mandelstam."
― The New York Times Book Review
"The ultimate futility of all accomplishment, the fascination of loneliness, the way sorrow colors our perception of the world: Pessoa’s insight into his favorite themes was purchased at a high price, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. A modern masterpiece."
― Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker
"As addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino."
― The Washington Post Book World
"One of the central figures of European modernism."
― Max Nelson, The New York Review of Books
"Pessoa’s work The Book of Disquiet is one of life’s great miracles. Pessoa invented numerous alter egos. Arguably, the four greatest poets in the Portuguese language were all Pessoa using different names."
― NPR
"Nobody can render the the hollowed horror of a world wrung out quite as gorgeously as Pessoa."
― Bookforum
"Lyrical, poetic―but to call these paragraphs prose poems would be misleading. There is something necessarily prosaic about them. The Book of Disquiet is caught up in the steady drumbeat of ordinary life and all its detritus: a favorite pair of boots, a type of pant that’s in fashion, the way people in Lisbon pronounce Trás-os-Montes, but most of all the ordinary noise of the self thinking about itself. Its pages, like Pessoa’s trunk, are thick with thoughts."
― Poetry Foundation
"The Book of Disquiet, a literary vortex that, even in completeness, remains incomplete. A reading experience like no other. It is thrilling, confusing, upsetting, joyous, tedious and profound. You will never forget it, or stop wanting to return to it."
― Chris Power, The New Statesman
"A meandering, melancholic series of reveries and meditations. Pessoa's amazing personality is as beguiling and mysterious as his unique poetic output."
― William Boyd
"Extraordinary―a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticisms and maxims."
― George Steiner
"The very book to read when you wake up at 3 a.m and can't get back to sleep-mysteries, misgivings, fears, and dreams and wonderment. Like nothing else."
― Philip Pullman
