The Book of Disquiet

Bernardo Soares works as a bookkeeper in a Lisbon commercial firm, takes his meals alone in a Baixa restaurant, and lives in furnished rooms above the Rua dos Douradores. This is nearly the only action in Pessoa's unfinished book, which accumulates instead as fragments of consciousness: observations about the Tagus seen from a window, meditations on rain and dusk and the people passing below. Pessoa wrote these notes across three decades, never organizing them. What remains is both a portrait of early twentieth-century Lisbon — its trolley cars, its fado-haunted evenings — and an unclassifiable document of interior life.