He is a man on first-name terms with tedium and despair, but he challenges these in his writing, dedicating himself to describing the nebulous, abstract and sometimes terrifying nature of consciousness with the exactitude of a divine book-keeper: 'But there are also moments, like now, when I feel too oppressed and too aware of myself to be conscious of external things and everything then becomes for me a night of rain and mud, alone and lost in an abandoned railway station, where the last third-class train left hours ago and the next has yet to arrive. Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition Hardcover 88 ratings See all formats and editions Hardcover from 76.81 Other new and used from 76.81 Paperback 20.11 Other new and used from 17.13 Language English Publisher Profile Books Ltd Dimensions 6.38 x 1.54 x 9. The Book of Disquiet is the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, whom Pessoa described as a semiheteronym because his personality is not different from mine. This collection of fragmented, meandering observations and introspections cannot be described as a novel it is more an insomniac's journal, written in the persona of an accounting clerk in Lisbon, Bernardo Soares.

During his lifetime, his only fame was as a minor literary figure who co-founded the short-lived publication Orpheu after his death in 1935, 25,000 documents – essays, plays, poems, even horoscopes – were found in his attic and the academic scramble to assemble them began. He employed more than 70 different characters, imaginary identities that read one another's writing and wrote one another's obituaries.

Excerpt Disquiet They stood before the great gateway, all around an empty and open countryside, ugly countryside, flat mudploughed fields. Coetzee, Disquiet is a darkly beautiful and atmospheric story that will linger in the mind long after the final page is turned. A postmodernist poet posthumously adopted as part of the Portuguese canon, Fernando Pessoa (below) adopted a series of voices – or 'heteronyms' – in which to write. Exquisitely written and reminiscent of Ian McEwan and J.

The disquiet book