Le Livre de l'intranquillité de Bernardo Soares

Une lecture difficile et facile à la fois : rien de compliquer dans le phrasé, mais tellement dense au niveau des images, de la philosophie absurde que l'on se retrouve à passer beaucoup de temps à anoter, divaguer ou se dire que là par contre Pessoa - ou bien serait-ce Soarès ? - est un élitiste réac.

This is on of the books that I'll never finish. I just don't click with it.

I only got to skim through this book, but as others have noted, it's not really something that lends itself to being read from cover to cover in a few weeks. I had never heard of Pessoa when I picked this up - I was in the mood for a small paperback "biography" and thought this looked interesting.

At first, as I was reading it, Pessoa's thoughts seemed so random, but as I learned more about the "heteronyms" he wrote under, the complexity of his work quickly became apparent. I don't know how he managed to express such deep thoughts in the voice of a -- if only slightly -- different person. I'm not a voracious reader, but I can't think of another author who has created this kind of world of semi-autobiographical characters. Fascinating stuff.

This book is dense with fascinating ideas and tangents. The entries can be read out of order and are rich enough to read more as you would read poetry. I love the reckless abandon into self absorption and the insight into the inconsistency of personality, ambition and will. It is a kind of Portuguese Notes from the Underground, only lighter, less arrogant and more integrated with the setting.

Pessoa is one of my favourite authors and I am looking forward when they get around to compiling the rest of his scraps of writing bundled in the thousands from his big old chest. "The Book of disquiet" is not just disjointed prose but a travel-log of thought, for me it is the moment you put up the umbrella when it is raining and the moment you put it down when the rain stops, if that makes any sense, it is that between thought.

I actually had someone reading over my shoulder on a long train journey whilst reading this book, and they had to ask before I got off who the author was.