Fernando Pessoa | Slightly Foxed literary review

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The Book of Disquiet, [81] 39

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Master of Invention

Adam Foulds on Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet (1982) is, strictly speaking, a book that isn’t a book by an author who isn’t an author. How does such a thing come into the world? Perhaps only under a very unusual configuration of stars. The great Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa might have been able to tell us: a firm believer in astrology, he would cast horoscopes for the non-existent authors whose many works he wrote. Two of these phantoms are responsible for The Book of Disquiet, although it is credited finally to only one, Bernardo Soares. The first, Vicente Guedes, slowly vanishes over the decades of its creation, lingering only as the ghost of a ghost.