The Book of Disquiet

Assembled from fragments Fernando Pessoa left unpublished at his death, The Book of Disquiet is one of the strangest and most beautiful books of the twentieth century — a "factless autobiography" attributed to Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon who lives almost entirely inside his own mind.

There is no plot and almost no incident. Instead there are hundreds of short meditations, diary entries, and reveries on solitude, boredom, dreams, the tedium of daily work, and the impossibility of ever fully knowing oneself. Soares watches the Lisbon streets, the weather, and the small dramas of the office, and turns each observation inward into something luminous and melancholy.

Endlessly quotable and quietly devastating, Pessoa's masterpiece is less a book to be read straight through than one to be opened at random and inhabited — a companion for anyone drawn to the inner life and its beautiful, restless disquiet.