Wednesday, January 4, 2012

It is more difficult to be someone else in prose - the Book of Disquiet readalong.

I am thinking March, aiming at the last week of March, as a good time to write about The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa’s semi-fictional non-novel un-diary.  Whatever it is.  I invite anyone interested to join in however they like.

The Book of Disquiet is only a novel in the sense that we now stretch the word “novel” to cover unclassifiable fictional objects.  The book has no obvious story, no plot, or characters aside from the narrator, but is instead a series of observations, sketches, and aphorisms, the diary of a Lisbon bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares.  Pessoa wrote that Soares has Pessoa’s style, but was “distinct from me in ideas, feelings, modes of perception, and understanding.”*  So the book is a fictional exercise of some sort.

I am in large measure the very prose I write.  I punctuate myself, and, in the unchained distribution of images, I wear newspaper hats, the way children do when they play at being king; by making rhythm out of a series of words, I crown myself, the way mad people do, with dried flowers that remain alive in my dreams.  And above all, I am tranquil, like a sawdust-stuffed doll, which, having acquired awareness of itself, shakes its head from time to time so that the bell on its pointed hat plays something, life rung by the dead, a minimal warning by Destiny. (152-3, Alfred Mac Adam translation)

Please see this essay at Vapour Trails for more Disquiet.

The What-is-it problem is worse than it seems.  The Book of Disquiet is unfinished, perhaps never meant to be finished, and was unpublished until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death.  The order of the elements of the book cannot be established with certainty.  The text is not stable.

The book’s English history is odd, too.  Four versions exist (Richard Zenith, Alfred Mac Adam, Margaret Jull Costa, Iain Watson) all of which were published in 1991.  That must have been handy for book reviewers.  The Zenith version is the longest and most complete, including fragments and appendices and so on.  I will be reading Alfred Mac Adam.  The thing I want to emphasize is  that these are not just different translations, but translations of different texts, different orderings and excerpts of the mass of material.

I see this as an opportunity for a group read, not an obstacle.  With many readers, it might be possible to see more than I can by myself.  The Book of Disquiet is a perfect candidate for many readings, and many kinds of reading.  Seraillon recently finished it, over the course, he says, of two months (about four chapters a day).  Another reader may want to guzzle Pessoa, or just read fragments, such as the samples of The Book of Disquiet found in Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986) or Honig’s Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988).

Pessoa wrote and even published one more ordinarily fictional piece of fiction, the 1922 story “The Anarchist Banker,” a thirty page short story of ideas that has characters and dialogue and even a story, the story of how the anarchist became a banker, and why the banker is still an anarchist.  Read that instead.  Or, like me, also.

OK, March.  The end of March.

A couple of other readalong opportunities will intersect with Wuthering Expectations:  Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (see Caravana de recuerdos and in lieu of a field guide) and Our Mutual Friend (see The Argumentative Old Git).  The former has more of a schedule, while the latter does not.  When I finish Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, I will have read every Dickens novel.  How many pages into Little Dorrit was I, by the way, before I realized that “Dorrit” only had one “t”?  (Answer: 200).  What kind of an English name is that?

*  This quotation, and the post’s title, are from the fragment of Pessoa’s “Concerning the Work of Bernardo Soares” found on p. 209 of the Honig and Brown Poems of Fernando Pessoa.

22 comments:

  1. O Livro do Desassossego always half intimidated, half picked my curiosity. I can't make any promises, but I might join you at the end of March. It would be interesting to read it with non-Portuguese.

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  2. I hope my casual "two months" comment didn't figure into your setting the readalong for so far out. I simply found Pessoa's book to lend itself to small daily doses, and besides, I'm slow. In any event, I'm very much looking forward to the discussion, particularly if all the different translations get involved. Who knows - perhaps we'll end up producing a BoD concordance.

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  3. Offhand, and not pertinently (impertinently?) -- Pessoa shows up as a character in Laurie King's most recent detective novel. Each time he appears, he's "in character" as a different self.

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  4. A character in Laurie King? That's great, too funny. Mary Russell apparently buys Pessoa's guidebook to Lisbon (an actual book, although I think not really published until after his death).

    seraillon - no, the March date was my guess months ago. You just provided a useful example of an approach to the book. And a warning to anyone who thinks "It's not so long, I'll knock it off in a couple of days."

    Alex - that would be great if you joined us. You can correct all of our grotesque errors about Lisbon.

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  5. I'm still up for some Disquiet in March and may join you for "The Anarchist Banker" as well (sounds plenty Brechtian). 30 pages? That's a tempting readalong length. Also, thanks for mentioning (and participating in) the Savage Detectives get together--should be another title where multiple reader perspectives help illuminate a multi-faceted diamond in the rough.

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  6. Not sure I'll be doing much blogging by March, as I'll be in Oregon learning how to build with mud and straw...but I don't see that as an obstacle to READING some Pessoa. I plan to start sooner rather than later too.

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  7. Thanks for linking to my post on Disquiet. It certainly isn't a book that lends itself to being read at a trot.
    I found that it constantly slowed me down to its own pace and it is perfectly suited to having to hand somewhere where you simply open a page and read.

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  8. "The Anarchist Banker" is in the little Always Astonished collection, but I think also available elsewhere.

    Sarah - reading is a good start.

    Séamus - oh, my pleasure, that was a useful post. I have a serious disadvantage here, which you helped me solve, that I have not actually read the book.

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  9. I figured I'll have the Disquiet/Disquietude by Richard Zenith. But even that had several editions.

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  10. It could be worse (or I might mean better). The strangely written Book of Disquiet wiki page says:

    "The Book is a bestseller, especially in German (16 editions, from different translators and publishers)"

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  11. Re. I think also available elsewhere.

    Zenith included it in his Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. I wonder how much those two books overlap.

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  12. Yes! The Zenith Selected Prose, that's right. I do not really know what else is in that one. It is much longer than Always Astonished.

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  13. I found a copy in a library near here. It's a mixture of pieces that anyone interested in Pessoa would probably call Basic Essentials (essays in which heteronyms comment on other heteronyms, letters to friends explaining his thoughts about life, etc), and then rarities, unusual things (a script for a one-act play, the sole piece of writing from his only woman-heteronym, &c). There's a notZenith translation of the play here: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/09/fiction/the-mariner-a-static-drama-in-one-scene-1

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  14. Ok, I'm in. Now I have to decide on an edition. Ok. March then.

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  15. Another Portuguese person here and agreeing with Séamus Duggan: I think I've read most of it by reading random pages here and there through the years - I use it as comfort reading. Pessoa said the book was a "dreamed up confession of the uselessness and painful fury of dreaming".

    Anyway, curious to see what you make of it. March, you say?

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  16. Alfred Mac Adam, in the introduction to his translation, advises readers to read the whole thing in order once. Just once! And then read random pages forever after.

    So we''ll see. Nice to make your (Claudia, Seymour) acquaintances, by the way.

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  17. My copy of Disquiet has been waiting patiently for me to find the perfect time. This may be it.

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  18. I can believe that The Book of Disquiet is an unusually patient book.

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  19. I am doing an essay on the book and wonder if anyone has a chart that shows the different ordering and their correspondent "number" in the other editions, so that I can cross reference them, and most important find the Portugues original for any quotes I use. I'm reading the translation by Margaret Jull Costa which includes in brackets (parentheses) the corresponding fragment in the Atica portugues edition but I have the edition organized by Richard Zenith. So basically I need a chart that shows the fragments that correspond between the Atica and Richard Zenith edition.
    Much appreciated if anyone out there can help me.

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  20. Danny, best of luck with your question - I do not know the answer - and your entire project.

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