Fernando Pessoa will be an unknown name to many literary fans, but The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego) is a fantastic work (even if it is untraditional in structure).

It’s a vast, endlessly intelligent selection of thoughts based on everyone’s favourite hobby—existing.

Born in Portugal in 1888, Pessoa led a quiet life and died in Lisbon in 1935. Only afterwards was his work, which he’d worked on throughout his life with no dream of publishing, discovered amongst his possessions.

He wrote the work in as diary entries and this was in serious disarray until editors ordered it all for what is now this work.

The Book of Disquiet and Mastering a Sense of Sombre Majesty

You can view this work as a lifetime project. One pieced together through fragmentary writing and left totally unedited.

Pessoa intended it all as a “factless autobiography”.

The writer used Bernardo Soares as a pseudonym and the work was published under that guise. It’s the grand literary theme of the heteronym, various characters created by a writer to cover different styles.

In the Book of Disquiet, Soares contemplates his life and daily preoccupations such as work, his boss, colleagues, and the pet cat. Over 250 pages, Pessoa essentially writes concise paragraphs on the nature of existence and how we all live.

His beautiful prose, ever insightful observations, and obvious high intelligence keeps the reader coming back to learn more.

You can open the book on any page, read a random paragraph, and be presented with insightful insights and witticisms on how to lead your best life.

We’ll choose some arbitrary prose. Behold!

“Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in that stupidity.”

And that’s a good time to plug our review on The Psychology of Stupidity (2018) by Jean-Francois Marmion. A wise tome in its own right, too.

But Pessoa’s work is all about mysteries and misgivings. John Lanchester, in his introduction, wrote about the work:

“In the end, everything is relative. A tiny incident in the street, which draws [a] restaurant cook to the door, affords him more entertainment than any I might get from the contemplation of the most original idea, from reading the best book or from the most pleasant of useless dreams. And, if life is essentially monotonous, the truth is that he has escaped from that monotony better and more easily than I. He is no more the possessor of the truth than I am, because the truth doesn’t belong to anyone; but what he does possess is happiness. The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance.”

He also touts the importance of culture and escapism:

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

This is a stance reflected by other notables from the 20th century, such as Simone de Beauvoir. In The Age of Discretion from The Woman Destroyed (1967) she noted how culture has “the highest of values”.

The Book of Disquiet, and the state of disquietude, will certainly appeal to the introverts of this world.

Pessoa’s work is about one person’s day-to-day existence as he drifts through life wondering about the possibility of everything; love, life, death, better places, worse places, cats, sandwiches, and why he hates seeing himself in photographs.

There’s no real order to read this.

Simply pick it up and bask in its sense of eerie didacticism—the author offering his message to the world whilst, seemingly, never believe his work would ever be read by anyone.

Although we do believe there’s one line, buried amongst the mass of others, that reveals the most about this mysterious figure:

“I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.”

The Mystery of Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa is another literary great not celebrated during his lifetime, which in the 20th century can also be attribute to the likes of Franz Kafka.

The nature of The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa’s only work) has led to many scholarly interpretations (see the above video by Pursuit of Wonder).

As an example, the Portuguese literary scholar Teresa Sobral Cunha thinks there are two versions of the work:

1. Vicente Guedes for the 1910s and 1920s.
2. Bernardo Soares for the late 1920s and 1930s.

Other scholars suggest the first phase of the work is pure Pessoa.

Meanwhile the Franco-American literary critic George Steiner (1929-2020) wrote in 2001 in A man of many parts:

“The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa’s spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies – wonderfully echoed in Saramago’s great novel about Ricardo Reis – inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa’s Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet, which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie …

What we have is a haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims. ‘A Letter not to Post’, an ‘Aesthetics of Indifference’, ‘A Factless Autobiography’ and manual of welcomed failure (only a writer wholly innocent of success and public acclaim invites serious examination).”

English journalist and novelist John Lanchester wrote of it:

“In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience, and noise, here is the perfect antidote.”

We think that’s the most fitting tribute to what Pessoa did.

As enigmatic as he remains, and how his work opens up a million questions rather than answers, there is a sense of peace through his insights.

The mundane drudgery of working life holds within it many spectacular people, whose creative efforts are often lost to the wider world. This is a celebration of boredom and how to find freedom within its confinements.