The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa(1982)
Extract
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God.
A factless autobiography, assembled from fragments found in a trunk, recording the inner life of a Lisbon bookkeeper who never travels, never loves boldly, and never stops watching light change over the Rua dos Douradores. Bernardo Soares, the semi-heteronym through whom Fernando Pessoa channeled his most naked self, transforms the tedium of office work and rented rooms into metaphysical inquiry of staggering beauty. Published decades after Pessoa died in 1935, its unnumbered passages resist sequence, offering a shattered mirror in which consciousness sees itself from every angle. This is prose as pure sensation, a cathedral built from the act of paying attention to what it feels like to be alive.
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Sartre's Roquentin drowns in the same surplus of consciousness, but turns it into a system where Pessoa keeps it as a diary.
Sebald walks through the same melancholy, but gives it landscapes and ruins instead of a Lisbon office.
Dostoevsky's narrator seethes in the same isolation, but with rage where Pessoa has only weariness.