‘The Book of Disquiet’: A Life in Fragments
A review of ‘The Book of Disquiet’, by Fernando Pessoa; first published posthumously in 1982.
The Book of Disquiet could best be described as a book about nothing, by a man without a life. Such a description would never get past the marketing department, of course; but it is accurate. Nothing really happens in The Book of Disquiet, which means the book runs counter to Salman Rushdie’s rather common sense remark: that ‘in books, things happen.’ Still, Pessoa’s book is thought to be a masterpiece, a profound commentary on existence, solitude and the human condition, and an obvious inclusion in what we may loosely call the Western canon.
Pessoa speaks through a semi-invented author called Bernardo Soares, and Soares fills about five hundred pages with written renderings of his despair. These are not the melancholy musings of one who has gone through tragedy but rather, the reveries of one who has never really lived, and who has spent life witnessing the world as through a window. There is no story, no character arc, no sequence of events. There are only fragments; and if there is a connecting narrative thread, a structure according to which we might make sense of them, then we have not divined it yet. What we have is something like a mood. Eddie Grace, writing in The Paris Review, suggests that ‘it is properly speaking perhaps not a book at all’. Indeed, Fernando’s book reads like a long, rather drawn-out sigh, an exercise in wistfulness dragged out over hundreds of pages.
Pessoa speaks through a semi-invented author called Bernardo Soares, and Soares fills about five hundred pages with written renderings of his despair.
Soares, like his creator, lives in Lisbon, works in an office, and dreams of — well, everything and nothing in particular. He drifts about, entirely unmoved by duty, love, ambition, or any other consolation:
I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.
He is something like a cork bobbing along on the ocean. For Soares, to be ambitious is to place oneself beyond oneself. And one must remain within oneself. So his book is a work of profound interiority, the polar opposite of a Chandler story, or something by James Cain. There is no action here; there is only thought. And those thoughts repeat, and repeat, change a little, yet still stay basically the same. This is the diary of a man who will not evolve, not because he can’t, but because he does not see the point. He is neither tortured, nor even in pain. He is just … dissatisfied. Life is unsatisfying. It is as if he has set out to render that crucial, superficially depressing Buddhist insight: that life is inherently unsatisfying.
He is something like a cork bobbing along on the ocean.
One wonders then why one ought to continue with such a gloomy book. One wonders why one should spend one’s Sunday afternoon indulging such lugubriosity, such self-involvement. And the answer to that question is that Pessoa succeeds in doing something very rare, which is to capture the true, unvarnished essence of introspection. He does not try to make sense of life, much less to ennoble it. He does not attempt to offer insight, as in Essays in Idleness. He aims only to record mental life, to study its texture, the texture of thought itself with its loops and hesitations, its defeats, its absurdity.
Insofar as we accept that what Pessoa strives to render is true, that is, that life really is an attempt just to keep ourselves busy, to escape from its fundamental tedium, the book is really quite bleak. But if there is an undercurrent of sadness in The Book of Disquiet, there is at least not much by way of suffering. Soares does not mourn his fate. He accepts it. He almost—almost—enjoys it. He takes pride in his failure, his mediocrity, his refusal to engage with the world. He is a kind of proto-hikikomori, an inversion of the mystic, putting mental life above actual life, which he disdains. All engagement with life, for Soares, is an exercise in deception.
Soares does not mourn his fate. He accepts it.
The extent to which this is an autobiography—Pessoa called it a ‘factless autobiography’—is up for debate. Pessoa was highly creative, and creative people have a tough time crystallising a single sense of self. Fittingly Fernando had many selves and wrote under dozens of pseudonyms, from the noble Chevalier de Pas to Horace James Faber and Alexander Search. Soares is one of the more extreme expressions of Pessoa’s habit of detachment, a radical literary version of Pessoan introversion. He is essentially a mind without a body, a voice without a speaker. The world of Soares contains no romance, no adventure, no need or desire for escape. Thought itself simply circulates endlessly, and if it finds meaning at all it is in its own meaninglessness.
In reading this book, one must surrender to that meaninglessness: surrender to the rhythms, the slow waves that wash over one over and again. To expect meaning is to render it unreadable. But shed one’s need for a point, a direction and the book reveals its secrets. It is not one to be read quickly, nor in full. It is better to dip into it, ponder it, set it aside, think on it. Its extreme introspection might enliven your inner life or make you feel that you are going slightly mad. That is to say it might not be to your taste; but then one never has the sense Pessoa cares whether we like his book or not. He aims not to entertain, nor to teach. His book exists, just as thoughts exist, just as Soares, or rather Pessoa, existed. It is a book that tries to render nothingness with something.
