Daniel Myers 2008-01-26
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
"Tedium", the most recurrent theme in these collections, by Pessoa's (or, excuse me, one of his "heteronym's") definition is the "serious disease of feeling there's nothing worth doing." Another one of these heteronyms remarks at an earlier point that "...the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table." This, at any rate, was the effect this book had on me. Normally, I knock off a book of this length in a couple days. It's taken me a month now to complete. Every time I picked up this particular book, I said to myself, time and again, "What's the point? It's just going to be more tedious description of tedium." And I was quite correct. I think most readers would do well to heed another remark made in this book, to wit, that all this has been said before in the book of Ecclesiastes. He might have added that Ecclesiastes is much shorter, more moving and less redundant as well.
What saves The Book of Disquiet from being an utter wash is the conflict essential in it. Pessoa and his heteronyms, despite their sense of life's futility, love literature and words with such utter devotion that living life as if in a book seems the only hope of salvation from the torpor of existence:
"To see all things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events." P.211
This, and Pessoa's beautiful use of language, as translated by Robert Zenith in any event, save the day:
"We don't know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the road like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I'll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world's darkness." P.179
Perhaps a bit on the belaboured side anent reeds and rivers and wild ducks---Still, never was meaningless death by sluggishness so gloriously apotheosized. Passages like this make the book worth reading, perhaps. But, caveat lector, don't expect to close the cover with any sense of enchantment. The book, cover to cover, is full of emptiness.
