The Book of Disquiet

"Yes, that’s The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, of whom I hadn’t heard before I bought the book. Pessoa was a Portuguese writer of all sorts of things, a poet, and a journalist. He was a man of mystery in many ways. He had a large number of what he called ‘heteronyms’—noms de plume, I suppose is how we’d understand it. He invented personalities and characters and backstories and so on for all of his heteronyms, and he would write under any one of these different names. What for? I don’t know. Perhaps he just liked being rather mysterious. The Book of Disquiet seems to be the work of a bookkeeper called Bernardo Soares, who is, of course, Pessoa. It’s a book of bits, really. It doesn’t matter what order you read it in, because it is in fragments. In fact, the two editions in English in paperback that exist now are both quite different in terms of ordering. The one that’s published by Penguin Modern Classics is quite long, over 500 pages, and I don’t think it would be terribly easy to read it from end to end. I don’t know what you feel, but I found it extremely good to read at three in the morning if you can’t sleep. It’s suffused with a very Portuguese melancholy, saudade . It’s a book of reflections and memories and thoughts. But it doesn’t seem to be in any helpful order. So it really doesn’t matter to me where I pick it up, where I open it, but I always find something original and quirky and strange—a long paragraph about the virtues of monotony, for example, which fits his life, because he lived a very quiet life. He would go to the same café and have the same drink among a small circle of friends, while at the same time living this extraordinary life full of heteronyms, full of invisible people whom he would impersonate and write in the name of. I don’t know anything else like it. There have been two at least two translations into English and the two paperback editions I’ve got are, as I mentioned, quite different in order. But structure, as I always tell people, is a superficial feature of narrative, not a fundamental feature. They tell you, you must get your structure right first and once you have got the structure you can write the book. Well, no, actually. You can change the structure at the last minute, you can re-order the book, you can have the start in the middle of the story. Structure is a superficial thing. What is not superficial, what is really fundamental, is the tone in which the book is written. Here Pessoa is a good example because the tone is is very consistent all the way through. It’s never boring and it’s never dull. It’s always interesting because the mind that wrote it is interesting, and the world he depicts, the Portugal of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, is a fascinating place. I find it intoxicating. I love it very much. I’m almost inclined to make it my desert island book if I get a second go on Desert Islands Discs. I don’t think you can get tired of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it changes itself overnight, you know, chapters get out and slip into another place different place in the book. That wouldn’t surprise me a bit. I don’t think there’s anything else like it, as picture of a city. Lisbon as a character comes through very clearly in the book. I suppose, in a very different kind of way, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria does in The Alexandria Quartet— those four books that were so highly thought of for about five years around 1960. The character of the city of Alexandria comes through very powerfully and pungently in those books, but I can’t remember the story. That’s certainly the case with Pessoa’s Lisbon. I’ve never been to Lisbon, but I’m sure I’d recognise it through having absorbed so much of the atmosphere, the saudade . I can’t do without it. I can’t imagine it ever not being on my bookshelves and close at hand. Yes, that’s very persuasive. That idea also comes into one of the other books we’re going to discuss. I don’t know if it’s a particularly Portuguese thing—the other book is by an Italian, so perhaps it isn’t. But I wouldn’t want to make it sound willed in any kind of programmatic way. He seems to drift quite happily and easily between this character and that, between this place in Lisbon and that, between this bridge and this riverbank, and that café, as if he’s a ghost almost. He’s the ghost of all these things, and observing them as a ghost. There’s a great fluidity, it’s a very watery sort of book."

"This is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think, gets at the idea that the internet and the stories we follow are, to a lot of us, extremely important and exciting and meaningful, though really they are just a few changes of characters on a little screen somewhere. It is a philosophical tract. A collection of aphorisms, observations. It’s very rewarding to read and I’ve found that most people have not read this book, but everyone who has tried it, around 20 people that I know, have loved it. Absolutely. Something that might seem a small change to a lot of observers is a big change to the person watching it and that we should think about our lives in those terms and not look for the big dramatic exciting moment, that interest and excitement can be found in other ways."