Sitting in his "pokey office," he recognizes himself as one of many people who make their way through life with "sad, exalted hearts." He notes: "I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress. This is more than a difference in tone Soares sees an existential fraternity that Guedes does not. Where Guedes imagines himself a gifted dreamer trapped in a prison cell, Soares wryly likens himself to a "little girl embroidering pillowcases" to pass the time.
This is the text that has earned the novel's standing as Pessoa's pi ce de resistance. "I want your reading of this book to leave you with the sense of having lived through some voluptuous nightmare," he declares.Pessoa himself planned a "rigorous" pruning and revision of Guedes's droning that never occurred, and newcomers to The Book of Disquiet should consider skipping straight to Soares's half. Guedes is all preening self-absorption and jejune metaphysics he's like an introverted version of Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Arranging these fragments chronologically for the first time, Pizarro reveals that Pessoa composed them in the voices of two distinct characters: the office clerk Vicente Guedes and the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares.Pessoa wrote Guedes's section first, and it's easy to see why these earlier texts, which date from 1913 to 1920, have been left out or buried among Soares's entries in previous editions of the novel. Composed mostly on the eve and during the aftermath of World War I, The Book of Disquiet looks movingly at inertia and refusal it's the Portuguese cousin of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and Waiting for Godot.First published in 1982, 47 years after Pessoa's death, The Book of Disquiet presents a series of "random impressions," diarylike passages that double as articulations of personal philosophy. Reviewed by Marcela ValdesA triumph of scholarship and translation, this collaboration between editor Pizarro and translator Jull Costa presents in English one of the greatest works of Portuguese fiction in its entirety for the first time.
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