The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet is the diary of Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in 1930s Lisbon and one of the many invented authors, or heteronyms, that Fernando Pessoa wrote under. Across hundreds of short, unnumbered fragments, Soares records his sense of estrangement from the world: the tedium of his office, the streets he walks without belonging to them, and the constant feeling of watching his own life from a slight distance. There is no plot in the conventional sense. Instead the book accumulates as a portrait of a mind that finds the ordinary business of living faintly unreal. Pessoa left the work unfinished and unordered at his death in 1935, and the book exists in several editorial arrangements assembled from the papers he left behind.