--- product_id: 82922525 title: "The Book of Disquiet" price: "€ 25.57" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.gr/products/82922525-the-book-of-disquiet store_origin: GR region: Greece --- # The Book of Disquiet **Price:** € 25.57 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Book of Disquiet - **How much does it cost?** € 25.57 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.gr](https://www.desertcart.gr/products/82922525-the-book-of-disquiet) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description With its astounding hardcover reviews Richard Zenith's new complete translation of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET has now taken on a similar iconic status to ULYSSES, THE TRIAL or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as one of the greatest but also strangest modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes linked fragments, it is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture. Review: I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a ... - Once in a rarest while there comes a delightfully chaotic book that enchants as much as it frustrates, that heals as much as it scorches, and that sooths as much as it disturbs. Reading such a book in which thoughts, consciousness, and perceptions appear as fragments that do not combine to form a coherent whole, one is often left wondering how to make sense of it all. How should one come to grips with its determined melancholy, its breathtaking audacity, and its insistence that inaction, despair, and renunciation are the sine qua non of life? “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa is one such modern masterpiece that I read last week. The book is an aggregation of disparate diary entries that are abstract, dense, and at times, eccentric. For its entire four hundred plus pages it offers a philosophy of a melancholic life, a philosophy of dreaming, and a philosophy of art. I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a unique reading experience. The book is a congeries - a fragmentary collection of angst-ridden aphorisms, reflections, and musings in the form of diary entries found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. In passage after passage that are at once lyrical and haunting, he bares his brooding soul while lying awake through insomniac nights when incessant rain falls on the rooftops of his beloved Lisbon where he lives in a cheap, rented room with cracked walls owned by a loathsome landlady. “Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it.” [p 128] Pessoa was a compulsive writer who penned his thoughts relentlessly, day and night, on whatever he could lay his hands upon – “…in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of envelops, on paper scraps, and the margins of his own earlier texts.” To add to the confusion, Pessoa wrote under different names that he chose to call “heteronyms” – fictional alter egos with their own distinct biographies, writing styles, personalities, political attitudes, and individual pet peeves. These jottings, largely hand written and mostly undated, presented a challenge to the publishers who took years to compile them together into a book structure. The book records his meandering thoughts in which he constantly floats through gossamer boundaries that separate his real world from his dreams, his inaction from his thoughts, and his ambition from his weariness. “The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfillment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen. That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. [p 143] Pessoa’s art consisted of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, and horoscopes and assorted other texts that he wrote through more than four dozen invented heteronyms. Actually, he has credited “The Book of Disquiet” to Bernardo Soares, one such heteronym who is a bookkeeper by profession. Pessoa, as Soares, writes: “Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful. [p 25] For Pessoa, literature is “the most agreeable way of ignoring life” because it “retreats from life by turning it into a slumber.” In a beautiful passage this is how he further explores literature: “To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life.” [p 30] Pessoa wrote poetry and prose both and in an insightful passage explains the difference between the two: “I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.” [P 199] After reading a few pages a day, I would often find myself adrift with thoughts on renunciation or solitude or tedium because, Pessoa ensnares you, seduces you, and grips you with his flights of imagination that are mesmerizing. When he talks about giving things up it is not because he doesn’t what them, but because he does. Can there be a more intriguing Gordian knot? Consider this: “Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.” [p 203] I read the book in dribs and drabs, savoring its flavor, enjoying the voluntary siege to which I surrendered myself. The majestic splendor of Pessoa’s prose often left me heady. Despite the dark and somber tone, there are luminous passages that brim with life. Here is one: “Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my definitive being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.” [p 23] Although he was a prolific writer, Pessoa published merely four books during his lifetime. He left behind more than 25,000 manuscripts and typed pages that are still being deciphered and catalogued by experts. Perhaps he felt there was something noble in not being published because in a rather prescient manner, this is what he writes about an unpublished writer: “The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.” [p 187] Despite Pessoa’s assertion about noble virtues of a non-published writer, I am glad that Penguin has been updating its various editions from time to time as more and more material is getting deciphered. The literary world would have been a poorer place without this effort. I cannot but highly recommend this book that chronicles the life of one of the greatest flaneurs as he walked and worried through the streets of Lisbon assembling and disassembling his own eclectic mind. Review: One of the greatest writers of the modern era. - Seering in his assessment of this world. so relevant are his ideas even after 90 years of his passing. A literary genius. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #3,509 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #244 in Contemporary Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,192 Reviews | ## Images ![The Book of Disquiet - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/916OAslAstL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a ... *by G***A on 21 February 2018* Once in a rarest while there comes a delightfully chaotic book that enchants as much as it frustrates, that heals as much as it scorches, and that sooths as much as it disturbs. Reading such a book in which thoughts, consciousness, and perceptions appear as fragments that do not combine to form a coherent whole, one is often left wondering how to make sense of it all. How should one come to grips with its determined melancholy, its breathtaking audacity, and its insistence that inaction, despair, and renunciation are the sine qua non of life? “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa is one such modern masterpiece that I read last week. The book is an aggregation of disparate diary entries that are abstract, dense, and at times, eccentric. For its entire four hundred plus pages it offers a philosophy of a melancholic life, a philosophy of dreaming, and a philosophy of art. I have not read anything like this before and consider this to be quite a unique reading experience. The book is a congeries - a fragmentary collection of angst-ridden aphorisms, reflections, and musings in the form of diary entries found in a trunk after Pessoa’s death. In passage after passage that are at once lyrical and haunting, he bares his brooding soul while lying awake through insomniac nights when incessant rain falls on the rooftops of his beloved Lisbon where he lives in a cheap, rented room with cracked walls owned by a loathsome landlady. “Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it.” [p 128] Pessoa was a compulsive writer who penned his thoughts relentlessly, day and night, on whatever he could lay his hands upon – “…in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of envelops, on paper scraps, and the margins of his own earlier texts.” To add to the confusion, Pessoa wrote under different names that he chose to call “heteronyms” – fictional alter egos with their own distinct biographies, writing styles, personalities, political attitudes, and individual pet peeves. These jottings, largely hand written and mostly undated, presented a challenge to the publishers who took years to compile them together into a book structure. The book records his meandering thoughts in which he constantly floats through gossamer boundaries that separate his real world from his dreams, his inaction from his thoughts, and his ambition from his weariness. “The dream that promises us the impossible denies us access to it from the start, but the dream that promises the possible interferes with our normal life, relying on it for its fulfillment. The one kind of dream lives by itself, independently, while the other is contingent on what may or may not happen. That’s why I love impossible landscapes and the vast empty stretches of plains I’ll never see. [p 143] Pessoa’s art consisted of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, and horoscopes and assorted other texts that he wrote through more than four dozen invented heteronyms. Actually, he has credited “The Book of Disquiet” to Bernardo Soares, one such heteronym who is a bookkeeper by profession. Pessoa, as Soares, writes: “Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as a butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful. [p 25] For Pessoa, literature is “the most agreeable way of ignoring life” because it “retreats from life by turning it into a slumber.” In a beautiful passage this is how he further explores literature: “To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life.” [p 30] Pessoa wrote poetry and prose both and in an insightful passage explains the difference between the two: “I consider poetry to be an intermediate stage between music and prose. Like music, poetry is bound by rhythmic laws, and even when these are not the strict laws of meter, they still exist as checks, constraints, automatic mechanisms of repression and censure. In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.” [P 199] After reading a few pages a day, I would often find myself adrift with thoughts on renunciation or solitude or tedium because, Pessoa ensnares you, seduces you, and grips you with his flights of imagination that are mesmerizing. When he talks about giving things up it is not because he doesn’t what them, but because he does. Can there be a more intriguing Gordian knot? Consider this: “Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything—whether or not it has ever existed—satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.” [p 203] I read the book in dribs and drabs, savoring its flavor, enjoying the voluntary siege to which I surrendered myself. The majestic splendor of Pessoa’s prose often left me heady. Despite the dark and somber tone, there are luminous passages that brim with life. Here is one: “Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my definitive being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.” [p 23] Although he was a prolific writer, Pessoa published merely four books during his lifetime. He left behind more than 25,000 manuscripts and typed pages that are still being deciphered and catalogued by experts. Perhaps he felt there was something noble in not being published because in a rather prescient manner, this is what he writes about an unpublished writer: “The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes.” [p 187] Despite Pessoa’s assertion about noble virtues of a non-published writer, I am glad that Penguin has been updating its various editions from time to time as more and more material is getting deciphered. The literary world would have been a poorer place without this effort. I cannot but highly recommend this book that chronicles the life of one of the greatest flaneurs as he walked and worried through the streets of Lisbon assembling and disassembling his own eclectic mind. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of the greatest writers of the modern era. *by M***N on 24 August 2025* Seering in his assessment of this world. so relevant are his ideas even after 90 years of his passing. A literary genius. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Strangely genius, and familiar *by T***L on 6 March 2026* I stumbled upon Pessoa after finishing Salinger- The catcher of the rye. I picked up many books after reading Salinger, notably some of my favorite authors from years back like Chekhov, Kafka, but something felt missing. Then I openes up this innocous book from my bookshelf, and my world was shaken. I couldn't believe myself. It almost makes you bleed, softly, in blue, or shades of gray. It's a compelling read, and I'm taking it slow - and I'm pretty sure the next book isn't gonna come easy to me. Pessoa has surely ruined so many other books already. ## Frequently Bought Together - The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa - Paperback - The Trial - Stranger By Albert Camus --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.gr/products/82922525-the-book-of-disquiet](https://www.desertcart.gr/products/82922525-the-book-of-disquiet) --- *Product available on Desertcart Greece* *Store origin: GR* *Last updated: 2026-05-29*