Matthew McElroy ’s Reviews > The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition > Status Update

I'm hoping to finish this weekend. I doubt I'm smarter than all the people who have studied and translated Pessoa, but the single redeeming grace in this book is reading it aloud.
I really think it is supposed to be a book of poetry.
Because if it's not, this is a jumbled, egomaniacal, nihilistic mess.

P194 But the minute I pick up a book from the table my interest in reading vanishes; the physical fact of having to read it negates the desire to read...
😒 I wonder what Pessoa is reading.

P272 "Just as some people work because they're bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say."
This is the single most accurate thing Pessoa has written, so far.

P191 "I hate reading. I feel a kind of anticipatory medium at the prospect of all those unread pages."
Ugh, right back at you, Fernando. All we have really learned is that the author dwells in a medium he loathes.

"If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too."

The narrator is clearly a stand-in for the author, though it is supposed to be someone different. But it's hard to believe an author would write a book that he didn't want to be read.

Chris Power said this is "a reading experience unlike any other". Thank goodness.
On p151, we are finally made aware that the narrator may not be the actual author. The first phase just starts. The second phase has the shortest of introductions: "From the Book of Disquiet" composed by Bernardo Soares.

Telling a story through a different narrator is not inventive. That narrator having nothing to say or do is new.

What am I reading?

P111 "Those of us who are not pederasts wish we had the courage to be so. A dictate for action inevitably has a femininity effect. We missed our true vocatio. As housewives and idle chatelaines because of a sexual mismatch in our present incarnation. While we do not totally believe this, to pretend we do savours the blood of irony."

P102 "Please don't think I write in order to publish, or simply for the sake of writing or making art. I write as an end in itself, the ultimate refinement, the temperamentally illogical refinement, of my cultivation of states-of-soul."
He's writing for himself, not for anyone else. And I'm not sure this is a character. I think this is autobiographical.