They tell you, you must get your structure right first and once you have got the structure you can write the book. But structure, as I always tell people, is a superficial feature of narrative, not a fundamental feature.
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. Yet this seems to be a book which not only doesn’t have an obvious shape, but even comes in different forms with different publications. I was fascinated that you chose this book because you’ve written in very interesting ways about the structure of stories. 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. 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. But it doesn’t seem to be in any helpful order. It’s a book of reflections and memories and thoughts. It’s suffused with a very Portuguese melancholy, saudade. 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. 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. In fact, the two editions in English in paperback that exist now are both quite different in terms of ordering. It doesn’t matter what order you read it in, because it is in fragments. The Book of Disquiet seems to be the work of a bookkeeper called Bernardo Suarez, who is, of course, Pessoa. Perhaps he just liked being rather mysterious. 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.
He had a large number of what he called ‘heteronyms’-noms de plume, I suppose is how we’d understand it. Pessoa was a Portuguese writer of all sorts of things, a poet, and a journalist. Yes, that’s The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, of whom I hadn’t heard before I bought the book. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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