The Book of Disquiet in On Paths Unknown

May 17, 2018 P.E. rated it liked it

Shelves: essay, black-humour, diary, monologue, unusual-narrator, portuguese-literature

1. - 28/07/2018 :
Aujourd'hui, c'est jour de repos, cette fois, je passerai le week-end à Lorient.

Ce matin exercices physiques, partie par habitude, partie par plaisir. Ensuite, un bout de Mrs Dalloway.
En cours de lecture, sorti dans la rue rayonnante, fraîche, matinale, au hasard des rues, en direction du Vent des Mots, passé prendre Earthly Powers de A. Burgess et The Book of Disquiet, traduction de Fernando Pessoa par Richard Zenith. L'employée renseigne une enseignante, je laisse mon regard s ...more

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Jan 15, 2020 Ronald Morton rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: new-directions, in-translation, read-in-2020, portugese

There will be a decent amount of words here, the general TL:DR is that this a signpost work of Modernist fiction that easily makes my top 10 Modernist works (a list that I’m forever revising) and should absolutely be read by any fan of Modernism. This shouldn’t be surprising; its reputation precedes it.

Which is funny, as while its reputation did in fact precede it, it turns out that its “reputation” was so ridiculously narrow that I had no clue what I was getting into when I picked up this book. There will be a decent amount of words here, the general TL:DR is that this a signpost work of Modernist fiction that easily makes my top 10 Modernist works (a list that I’m forever revising) and should absolutely be read by any fan of Modernism. This shouldn’t be surprising; its reputation precedes it.

Which is funny, as while its reputation did in fact precede it, it turns out that its “reputation” was so ridiculously narrow that I had no clue what I was getting into when I picked up this book. And that’s the way I like it, generally, but for this book, specifically, it helps to have some context.

Sometimes inside me, I cast an impartial eye over those absurd, delicious things that I cannot see because they are apparently illogical—bridges that begin nowhere and go nowhere, streets With no beginning and no end, upside-down landscapes—the absurd, the illogical, the contradictory, everything that detaches and distances us from the real and from its misshapen retinue of practical thoughts and human feelings and desires for useful, effective action. The absurd saves us, despite the tedium, from the state of soul that begins with the sweet fury of dreaming.

And somehow I find a strange, mysterious way of envisioning those absurdities—I don’t know how else to explain it, but I see things of which visibility cannot even conceive.

Let’s start with Pessoa himself. [copying and pasting some Wikipedia to save me some typing] Fernando Pessoa “was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French. Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them all pseudonyms because he felt that some did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms.” Let’s pause, and focus on that last bit, as it is significant, both to Pessoa in general and this book in specific. Pessoa did not write pseudonymously (where he just wrote under a fake name); he wrote under entirely fake personas. Wikipedia lists around 80-90 distinct heteronyms (varies by article) he wrote under, but the forward to the “Complete Edition” states that he actually had 136 heteronyms. 136. That’s nuts. Now, I’m sure some of them were less significant than others, but a few of them are actually widely considered to be a part of the pantheon of the greatest Portuguese poets. "A few of them". Poets, plural.

Mind truly and completely blown.

This book is a single state of soul, analyzed from every angle, traversed in every possible direction.

So, let’s talk about the book itself. First, it’s written from the perspective of two heteronyms (technically three, as Fernando Pessoa also had a heteronym under his own name – remember, part of the thing about these is the created backstory and perspective, so this is in fact possible – but the contribution of the Pessoa heteronym is like a single page, so it’s not terribly significant) - Vicente Guedes “wrote” first phase (during the 1910s and 1920s) and Bernardo Soares “wrote” the second phase (during the very late 1920s and 30s). Those date ranges are significant for two reasons. First, the opening entries were written during 1913 – 1914, so they precede Joyce’s Portrait Of An Artist by a couple years, and regardless holy shit was this guy writing at least a decade or so ahead of his contemporaries. The second thing to note is that the writing of this occurred over the course of decades. And, seeing as Pessoa died in 1935, you can check the date range and pretty quickly realize that he wrote this during his entire adult lifetime.

It was in fact not even published for the first time until 1982. The time between its discovery (after the death of Pessoa) and it’s first publication is fairly easily explained – it was discovered in a trunk, written on various pieces of paper over the course of those 3 decades. So there is here a “Complete” edition, but there remains arguments over the correct order of these passages.

Installed on the upper floors of certain respectable taverns in Lisbon can be found a small number of restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station. Among the clientele of such places, which are rarely busy except on Sundays, one is as likely to encounter the eccentric as the nondescript, to find people who are but a series of marginal notes in the book of life.

The two phases appear beyond argument; they are clearly differentiated in the source texts. And, they are pretty clearly differentiated by voice, tone, and focus when reading the book as a whole. The first phase is completely and utterly solipsistic, the Guedes heteronym having basically no need or desire for any sort of action, activity, or interaction that did not occur within his own head. The second phase is still really solipsistic, but Soares at least appears to acknowledge the outside world at times – probably grudgingly – and the work opens itself and expands its focus a great deal in the second phase.

All that said, and for all the enthusiasm I have for this work,

– it really is amazing; I had to stop grabbing quotes after like page 70 (though I broke that a few times through the rest of the book) as I quickly realized that so much of Pessoa’s writing and turns of phrase are so imminently quotable and ripe for pulling that I was losing a great deal of time snagging quotes and it was seriously hampering my progress –

this is not going to be for everyone. Those who thrill at Modernist literature are likely going to love it (and probably already do so), but this is a deeply, deeply insular book; those who complain over the lack of action in Ulysses are going to absolutely hate this. But those who are interested in the way that literature was approached and handled through the opening decades of the 20th century; the move away from traditional narrative in an ongoing and ever-shifting pursuit of how literature can capture life, and thought, with the recognition that so much that occurs is internal and never presented for external perusal; for those that tread those paths, and seek those works of literature out, this is utterly essential.