Book Of Disquiet, The

The discovery in the 1990s of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is reminiscent of the discovery of Kafka in the 1950s. Like Kafka, Pessoa left his work in disarray, much of it to be published posthumously. And throughout Europe, Pessoa has already become a literary icon of postmodernism, as Kafka was of modernism. He is portrayed on postcards and bookmarks, and in Portugal he is even on the 100 escudo bill. This season, both Grove Press and City Lights are publishing volumes of his poetry, and these should, in combination with Exact Change's republication of his major prose work, The Book of Disquiet, help ignite a similarly intense interest in North America.Much of Pessoa's mystique comes from his unique practice of writing under different "heteronyms". These heteronyms generated radically different texts, and Pessoa supplied them with distinct biographies, life spans, and even horoscopes. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa came as close as he would to autobiography. But the book is, like everything about Pessoa, an object of mystery. Left on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk discovered after the author's death, the fragments that make up The Book of Disquiet have no fixed sequence, and therefore every reader must make out of it a different text. It is the ultimate postmodern novel: hypertext perfected long before the advent of the internet.Each translation of The Book of Disquiet is thus remarkably distinct. Alfred Mac Adam's translation, published in hardcover by Pantheon in 1991, is the only one to originate in America, and has been widely reviewed as the most accurate and vivid. The New York Times Book Review called it "splendid", The New York Review of Books"fluent and resourceful", and the VLS said it is "the most doggedly precise", adding that "the other translations... miss the crucial air of formality".This mysterious book may become as important to our time as The Castle was a generation ago.