14 - The Birth of Literature

Summary

Let me recall a few of the more obtrusive characteristics of Fernando Pessoa's Livro do Desassossego [The Book of Disquiet] by Bernardo Soares.

The first is the series of descriptions of landscapes that pervades the book, usually skyscapes over Lisbon or over the bank of the river that skirts the city to the south. Such descriptions are Ruskin-like in their loving attention to chromatic detail. Colours are broken down into shades, shades into shades of shades, while the movement and shapes of clouds are clearly traced. The syntax of these weather charts seems to mirror their pictorial intent: sentences are fairly detailed, clause piles upon clause, and when we expect them to come to a full stop Soares adds yet another descriptive item. The virtuosity of the prose is meant to dazzle the reader.

The second is the book as a diary of the author's mediocre bureaucratic existence. The broken narrative of his life as an office clerk, on a second floor of Rua dos Douradores, and his life as the shabby genteel tenant of a room, on a fourth floor of the same street, is an extended irony on an existence set on achieving, or at least incessantly pondering, literary glory. Pessoa's book is in this sense close to a modern tradition of narratives detailing the sorrows of thwarted merit, from Rousseau to Balzac and beyond, as well as to a ‘bureaucratic’ fictional subgenre, from Melville to Kafka and beyond.