An absolutely beautiful, thought-provoking collection of seemingly random thoughts. He finds both the sadness and beauty in loneliness - this book has become a friend of mine. ( )

Of all the writers who have truly lived the life of a writer, trying to abolish the border between the I on the paper and the I in the world by transforming the latter into the first, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is probably the best example. Pessoa complemented his literary creation with that of several dozen personas, each with a different name and biography. These heteronyms—as Pessoa called them—were masks of Pessoa himself, although it would probably be more accurate to say that they were no one’s masks, as Pessoa often described himself as “no one.” In this respect he personifies poetic existence par excellence because he has transformed an esthetic idea—that of the author as a mask—into a way of being. Or rather: he has transformed his transient, mortal being into a work of art. He was a “passerby of everything, even of my own soul, belonging to nothing, desiring nothing, being nothing—abstract center of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror, reflecting the world’s diversity” (The Book of Disquiet).

If, as Paul Celan (whose last name is also a pen name, or more precisely an anagram of his “real” name, Ancel) has said, in the making of a poem, the I transforms himself entirely into a sign, Pessoa pushes the game of writing to its limit. In transforming himself into several dozen poets, he literally changes himself into numerous signs. It isn’t only his language that is an artifact; by incarnating Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares et al., Fernando Pessoa becomes himself an artifact, a beautiful fiction.

The heteronym with which Pessoa signed one of his most important works, The Book of Disquiet (prose), is Bernardo Soares. Described as an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon, Soares is distinct from Pessoa in ideas, feelings, modes of perception and understanding, but “does not differ from [him:] in his style” (Pessoa, “Concerning the Work of Bernardo Soares,” quoted in the Preface, p. 209).

In creating these heteronyms, Pessoa’s intention is to establish a “Portuguese neo-paganism, with various authors, each different.” More than once he embraces incoherence and change as the underlying principles of his life, and mystery and the unknown as the only things he knows.

Not my cup of tea. Too much prose and not enough story. Very dark and pessimistic, made me somewhat depressive. Very difficult to read. I gave it up after 100 pages. ( )

Here is a book which for all its talk of the art of dreaming demands the fullest external alertness in the reader, since anyone drowsily reading in expectation of a storyline, too close to snuggling into bed to take full pleasure in the craftsmanship of the language, will find himself utterly disappointed. A book which requires a stomach for the richest expressiveness (and mercifully lends itself to being read in short sessions), though it almost completely avoids overwritten expressions. A book which demands a ready sensitivity to form and a tolerance for hearing the same notes struck again and again in various combinations; a friend of mine grew tired of all this talk of dreaming in which few passages actually describe these fantastic dreams. A book bound to be best comprehended by persons melancholic as well as dreamy, for whom it will be no tonic, but perhaps also no poison. A book for the meditative, the introspective, the not-quite-successfully escapist, the restless, the regretful, the incurably poetic, and the estranged and lost.

In a letter quoted in the book, Pessoa wrote that if he was successful, one passage in particular would be felt as 'a dreamed confession of the painful, sterile rage and utter uselessness of dreaming'. He failed; beauty, even elegiac beauty, is too beguiling. But it is a frigid beauty all the same; dip into this book, and keep a warmer and more human one beside it to bring you back to earth.