In his lifetime he used a staggering seventy two of these as well as publishing under his own name. More than simply pen names, each character had their own style, biography and personality. Ironically for a man whose real name was Pessoa, which translates from Portuguese into English as 'person', he wrote in a variety of 'heteronyms'. The Book of Disquiet contains much of his prose writing - of which this edition has around half of them.

Fernando Pessoa lived between 18 but during his life he avoided the literary world, and indeed much of society, but wrote a vast amount of poetry and prose much of which has been published posthumously. In fact, one of the strengths of this Serpent's Tail Classics edition is the brief introduction by William Boyd that does just that. It is perhaps helpful to put this book into some kind of context. It's a tremendously difficult book to try to explain.

It's quite simply a masterpiece of modernist writing. Rather, dip into it at random and you will find a work of undeniable genius. But I would urge you not to read this book like that. It's so introspective that after a while the monotony of the writer's mundane existence starts to wear on the reader. Nothing much happens, and what we have is a collection of reveries and thoughts - almost a diary, but not quite - of existential musings about life, loneliness and the human condition. If you try to read The Book of Disquiet from cover to cover, it is almost oppressively melancholic. A collection of random musings of a fiercely contemplative mind rather than a novel, it is best treated as you would a book of poetry to be dipped into rather than read right through. Summary: An existential, modernist masterpiece.

The disquiet book