The Book of Disquiet

Bernardo Soares is the main character and first-person narrator of The Book of Disquiet. He is author Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, one of many literary personas Pessoa “endow[ed] with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits” (viii), according to translator Richard Zenith’s introduction to the 2003 Penguin Books edition. Pessoa uses Soares’s character to explore aspects of his own identity and experience via fiction. This formal and narrative choice enacts Pessoa’s notions regarding the amorphous nature of identity; Pessoa and Soares are both the writers of The Book of Disquiet. The novel can be equally deemed “a novel or an essay collection or even a kind of pre-internet codex blog” (“‘The Book of Disquiet’ Is the Weirdest Autobiography Ever.” Electric Literature). The narrative does not overtly distinguish between Soares’s and Pessoa’s identities: Soares’s selfhood is fabricated from his meandering dreams and imaginings, as Soares himself is a dream constructed by Pessoa. In his introduction, Zenith quotes Pessoa as having called Soares “a semi-heteronym […] because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it” (xi). This is to say that Soares is less distinct from Pessoa than many of Pessoa’s other heteronyms. In this book, he has hewed closer to autobiography than elsewhere.

Soares lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He works as a bookkeeper in an office located on the Rua dos Douradores—the same street where he also rents a room. Soares’s life is defined by his movements between work and home. When he isn’t working, he is most often at home, writing at his desk, lying on his bed, or staring out the window. Otherwise, Soares spends his time wandering the city streets or visiting local cafés. These public settings at times exhaust and oppress Soares—he often references his disgust with his fellow city dwellers or is irritated by the relentless sounds of the streets. At other times, spending time outside in the city offers Soares fodder for his imaginary worlds. He is a keen observer who obsessively studies his surroundings and eavesdrops on others’ conversations; these pastimes grant him access to new worlds, sensations, and consciousnesses he explores in his writing.

Soares is a loner by choice, and he embodies The Alienating Nature of Modern Urban Life. Throughout the novel, he attests to the absurdity of companionship and love, while his solitude alternately pleases and torments him. At times he asserts that solitude is the only path to freedom and happiness, while at other times he contradicts himself and admit his longing for company. Soares has a distaste for people even when he feels lonely; he is reluctant to engage others in conversation because he is afraid such social interactions will disrupt his imaginative life, which is inseparable from his writing practice. Sometimes he is so burdened by the presence of others that he longs to quit his job and leave the city altogether. “But even as I was imagining this,” Soares realizes, “I would feel regret. Yes, I say it as if confronted by the actual circumstance: I would feel regret” (17). He can’t stand his boss and coworkers, for example, but knows he would feel a void if they were absent from his life. Soares is thus mired in this dichotomous realm of thought. He chooses to spend his life in isolation, often longing for more human contact while actively swearing off socializing and romance. Living in Lisbon intensifies these aspects of his circumstances: He is constantly surrounded by activity, noise, and people, but is always located at a remove from the urban communal hubbub.

Soares is a dreamer and a writer—much like Pessoa himself. The translator asserts that Pessoa “wear[s] the mask of Bernardo Soares” (xix) to disguise the intensely personal nature of his autofictional work. Like Pessoa, Soares is almost always in the act of writing. He is penning a novel that seems impossible for him to complete. This aspect of Soares’s story overtly aligns with Pessoa’s biography. He wrote the fragments that now comprise The Book of Disquiet over the course of his life, but the text was not published as a complete work during Pessoa’s lifetime. The same is true for Soares, who is always writing but never finishing his project. His obsessive concerns with the book’s completion and the subsequent possibility of publication and fame offer insight into Pessoa’s own writing struggle.

Soares’s dreamy state of being and investment in his writing life capture the novel’s theme of Imagination as a Source of Meaning. Soares often feels incapable of engaging with reality. He escapes into his dream life to survive the pressures of modern society, politics, and culture. His penchant for imagining and for inactivity, however, intensifies his isolation. He is devoted to his art—which he believes is the only way to experience truth—but he also feels plagued by the self-imposed pressure to write a masterpiece that will grant his life meaning.

Soares is a despairing and emotional character who lives with depression. Pessoa never overtly diagnoses Soares’s mental state, but Soares’s repeatedly considers and then rejects suicide as if to reassure himself that he still values life. He sees all ambition and striving as futile, rejecting modern, capitalistic society’s preoccupation with activity and accomplishment, but this philosophy is incompatible with his dreams of writing a masterpiece and becoming famous. Because of this inconsistency, his artistic ambitions are always laced with irony, one of the book’s prevailing moods alongside the nearly untranslatable Portuguese concept of saudade, a melancholy nostalgia for the unmediated state of pure being attained, among all Pessoa’s heteronyms, only by the rural poet Alberto Caeiro. Soares is capable of appreciating beauty and goodness, but these sensations always prove fleeting. By the novel’s end, Soares is left feeling disillusioned and afraid of his own death; his death, he knows, will result in his erasure. He will be forgotten just as his barber will be; his absence will create little change on the Lisbon streets. To withstand this hard truth, Soares delves further into his dream life; he closes Part 2 with vivid depictions of his dream travels, which grant his banal existence some mystery and stimulation.