The Book of Disquiet in On Paths Unknown

Dec 10, 2014 Frances rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, own, best-among-favorites

"My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender."

This book is very important to me and changed on how I view myself, the world, and the people around me.

If you are the type of person who enjoys your alone-time so much and tends to seek it even when you're around other people, this book is for you. Solitude is not for every one. I have friends wh ...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Poet Gentleness rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics

I know this is going to be more of a confession than a review, but here we go.

I was gifted this book by a dear Goodreads friend, DC, who unfriended me, but I haven't unfriended her. (Why? Ask Pessoa, he will explain it better than I would ever.).

In fact, she sent it to me directly from Lisbon, Portugal, in Portuguese (It was not this edition). I felt as if the most wonderful of the gifts had landed on my lap because it was a shame that a prolific reader like me and a Portuguese (albeit Brazilia I know this is going to be more of a confession than a review, but here we go.

I was gifted this book by a dear Goodreads friend, DC, who unfriended me, but I haven't unfriended her. (Why? Ask Pessoa, he will explain it better than I would ever.).

In fact, she sent it to me directly from Lisbon, Portugal, in Portuguese (It was not this edition). I felt as if the most wonderful of the gifts had landed on my lap because it was a shame that a prolific reader like me and a Portuguese (albeit Brazilian) reader, had not read The Book of Disquiet.
To wrap the gift with a golden ribbon, I am finishing writing a trilogy (at that time), full of lonely and troubled characters, that are looking for some peace for their souls.
And as I read The Book of Disquiet, I felt my characters speaking many of his words to my readers. To explain themselves, their feelings, and their acts - weird and eerie, and why not say, scary - I felt myself being explained too.
I felt as if I was one of the hundreds lonely souls of Pessoa and one and each of my characters' souls. It took me a long time to gathered the courage to sit down and write this review.

I read the book in one night. Just like that. It was so easy. Easy because I knew I was reading it superficially that I would revisited it many and many times. It turned out to be one of my bedside table books. And it's so marked and dog eared that it seems an old book. Because its writing is as old as the world, as Pessoa must have been. It's a door to a painful new world of discoveries that were right there on my face. And I felt... dispossessed. Robbed. Of what I don't really know.

People tend to look at those who like solitude as psychiatric troubled. I know from personal experience. I don't quite know if I could live completely alone, but I feel perfectly comfortable with myself and my books, alone, on a sunny Sunday or a gloomy Friday night. Why shouldn't I? I'm not a recluse and I have a family, but specially as I write, and this is a long solitary journey - and if you're true to your writing there is no journey more important than that of the one into oneself, because each and every one of my characters are myself, even though they could have been blueprints of other people, I have experienced these blueprints one way or another.

When writing - or reading a good book - I can spend a full day alone and without saying a word. Sometimes I even forget to eat. I don't need to see the outside world. It is inside me. I don't need others' companies, they are all inside myself. And in a world that requires so much from one while gives out so little, why should I bother?
And then I understood... I understood the dispossessment I felt. Because when I was re-reading my own book, the second instalment of the trilogy, to finish a scene in the third, I could heard the words of Bernardo Soares in my ear...
"That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it."

Many times I stopped to ask how I could have written some of the parts of my trilogy or the philosophical essay (written in 1988 - published in 2013) because I could find in myself those deep, touching passages.
I'm a common, normal woman that has a family and many daily problems. And yet... And yet... "I don’t know how many souls I have."

The Book of Disquiet turned out to be the perfect lonely soul's bible.
This is not a 5 star rating. This is a 5 million star rating and a million thank you to my still dear friend, for her sensitivity and huge soul.

If there are guardian angels in this planet, I think I just found one of mine in The Book of Disquiet. ...more

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Jun 28, 2017 Toby rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I was inspired to read this after a visit to Portugal earlier this year, where I saw regular allusions to Pessoa as playing a pivotal part in the nation's cultural consciousness. In Portugal he is primarily considered a poet, but beyond the country's borders this collection of aphoristic meditations is thought of as his most famous work. I find this strange, considering he never attempted to publish this work in his lifetime, indeed it was not written as a manuscript but rather discovered as a m ...more

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