The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa author Richard Zenith translator Richard Zenith editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Published:28th May '15
Should be back in stock very soon
Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is a modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time. This complete and unabridged edition – published in Penguin Modern Classics - is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith
'The best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever' - The Guardian
*Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation*
'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the 'heteronyms', fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative 'factless autobiography' of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and narrative, creating one of the greatest - but also the strangest - modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes-linked fragments, The Book of Disquiet is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.
This edition includes notes on the reconstruction of the text, appendices containing material omitted from the final version and letters which Pessoa intended to incorporate into the text. This edition also includes a table of the 'heteronyms' used by Pessoa in his writing.
Fernando Pessoa (1888– 1935) was born in Lisbon but went to live in Durban, South Africa, at the age of seven. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer who ascribed much of his work to a variety of personas, or heteronyms, Pessoa published relatively little of his vast output and supported himself by writing letters in English for import– export firms. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.
Richard Zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, researcher and translator. He has edited and translated many works by Fernando Pessoa, including A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe – Selected Poems. His Pessoa: An Experimental Life was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.
His prose masterpiece... Richard Zenith has done an heroic job in producing the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever * The Guardian *
Judging the English alone, Zenith’s translation is most compelling... I want Pessoa to be as great as the version Zenith presents -- Chris Power * New Statesman *
One of the twentieth century's greatest literary talents... This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is... a masterpiece -- John Lanchester * The Telegraph *
Pessoa’s rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling, like the touch of a vibrating wire, elusive and persistent like the poetry... there is nobody like him * The New York Review of Books *
Fascinating, even gripping stuff . . . a strangely addictive pleasure * Sunday Times *
Extraordinary... a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims * The Observer *
A Modernist touchstone... no one has explored alternative selves with Pessoa’s mixture of determination and abandon... In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty, and silence * The Daily Telegraph *
Portugal's greatest modern poet ... deals with the only important question in the world, not less important because it is unanswerable: What am I? -- Anthony Burgess * Observer *
Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature... readers of Zenith’s edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa’s fractured sensibility... the self-revelation of a disoriented and half-disintegrated soul that is all the more compelling because the author himself is an invention... Long before postmodernism became an academic industry, Pessoa lived deconstruction -- John Gray * New Statesman *
The Book of Disquiet was left in a trunk which might never have been opened. The gods must be thanked that it was. I love this strange work of fiction and I love the inventive, hard-drinking, modest man who wrote it in obscurity * Independent *
ISBN: 9780241200131
Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 26mm
Weight: 446g
560 pages