The Book of Disquiet by Fernando PessoaMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Beautifully written drivel.
* groan *
To think I was soooo looking forward to reading this book, after seeing it praised to high heavens! Am very grateful to the book friend who helped source this rare find, but I'm simply not its target audience.
There's a Filipino word that encapsulates what I feel about this book, which I disliked but finished out of a sense of integrity: "Sayang." The closest equivalent in English is the phrase: "What a waste."
And it IS a waste in more than one sense: the reader's finite time and resources, as well as the author's considerable writing prowess. Critics describe Pessoa as a genius because he managed to write in different personalities (called "heteronyms"). If so, this is a genius who wrote a book spreading the disquiet in his own soul to others, infecting other minds with his overblown sense of superiority at his aesthetic aptitude and moaning about how destiny doesn't reward him with the fame that he deserves.
What is the book about? It's about "the inert soul of a born abdicator," a clerk in Lisbon who has "conversations with myself" about Tedium, the people he observes in the cafe, at the office; the alienation he feels from others, and random things like the rain and evening.
"He symbolized those who have never been anybody; that was at the root of his suffering."
I suspect Pessoa wrote this out of envy of people he considered less intelligent than himself, but happier than he could ever be.
I've met people who would like Pessoa. People who consider themselves superior to their fellow man would like him.
Give me a Matthew Arnold over a Pessoa any day, or a Louisa May Alcott. They believed, as I do, that we were meant to do our part in making this world better, not increase the despair of others over imagined attacks by Fate.
Reading is spending time with the minds of other souls. There are cleaner, purer, more beneficial souls to spend time with than Pessoa's.
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