Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet ***

I was familiar with Fernando Pessoa by virtue of the references to his work in José Saramago's novels, especially The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (whose title character is one of Pessoa's "heteronyms") and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (one of my favorite Saramago novels). I came across the Penguin edition of The Book of Disquiet and was captured by its title, the enigmatic photograph on its cover, and the legend of Pessoa.

The Book of Disquiet is composed from hundreds of unpublished fragments, compiled posthumously based on vague and contradictory notes from Pessoa. Editions vary widely in their content and organization, with Richard Zenith's being the most expansive and speculative. One of the book's major themes is how art inevitably falls short of its perfection in the author's imagination, so it's appropriate that Pessoa never settled on a final form for it.

The Book of Disquiet is a mixed bag. I believe there is a masterpiece lurking in this collection, but the reader has to extract it from the pile of fragments, notes, and alternative versions. Some sections are mere scraps, Pessoa's notes to himself; others are clearly variants of each other. Some are essayistic, others impressionistic. Insightful and near perfect sections hide among uninterpretable dross. There's a long section about tedium that lives up to its subject.

Overall it's like the critical edition for a book that never existed, comparable to Nabokov's The Original of Laura. The core novel is swamped by drafts intended to illustrate the author's intent and process. The effect of such a critical edition is usually to show how early drafts are not a masterpiece. 

As I read The Book of Disquiet, I couldn't help but imagine how I would select and organize the sections differently from Zenith. For example, there's a stretch where the tone and style becomes more academic; I would have banished those fragments to the "Disquiet Anthology" section at the end, or omitted them entirely since they do not appear to have the same author.

My favorite part of the book is the first 100 pages or so. The prose has a consistent mood and theme. The narrator stares out the window into the rainy dusk of the commercial Lisbon street where he works and lives. He ponders how our lived experience derives from our sensations, which don't differentiate between dreams and reality, and how dreams are more pure than actions. Reality always falls short of our imagination, so we should do everything we can to avoid pursuing or acting on our dreams.

Pessoa acknowledges the downside of the aloofness that he advocates, in terms that are a slight exaggeration of the way I feel about myself:  

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran me over and the funeral was on a rainy day. The logical reward of my detachment from life is the incapacity I've created in others to feel anything for me.

This edition of The Book of Disquiet would be a treasure trove for Pessoa devotees, but despite many impressive passages it failed to convert me into one.