kunalsen 's review for:

The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition by Fernando Pessoa

4.0

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Fernando Pessoa wrote as multiple people. He called them heteronyms as these are complete personas with their own biographies, philosophies and writing styles. Many years after his death a box full of writing was discovered, created by one of his heteronyms, Bernardo Soares. This book is a collection of these short biographical pieces.

I am not sure what can I say about this book. I could not agree with most of the philosophies of the author, but yet I wish I could sit down with him and debate, and I don’t think I would have minded if he could convince me otherwise. This is incredibly powerful writing, and a deeply rich philosophy that is beautiful but, I am convinced, fundamentally wrong. His entire philosophical structure rests on assumptions that I find aesthetically unpleasing and rationally unacceptable. To him life has a deeper aesthetic purpose, far beyond the reality of the natural world. He lives in this purely mental world by what he calls “dreaming”. He travels in his dreams, he loves in his dreams, and anything else that is “real’ is just uninteresting and a tedium to him. A fascinating existence, but how much did he, Pessoa, really believe in it?

The book left me with hundreds of questions, and thousands of fragmented thoughts that I’ll cherish all my life.