Livro do Desassossego
The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa's greatest literary achievement. An "autobiography" or "diary" containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa's death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa's entire writing life.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2025–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Oh, sure!
1. The Book of Disquiet by Bernardo Soares/Fernando Pessoa ("Livro do Desassossego" in the original Portuguese)
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
5. (As mentioned) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
It doesn't make much sense, but between 1. and 2. I'd put all of the currently known poetry and prose by Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis (in that order). I have a 3-book collection with this.
- Some pretty cool recommendations here!
I've personally neglected national (Portuguese) authors for about a decade now, so I've started focusing on that; I'm currently reading "Livro do Desassossego" by Fernando Pessoa.
For the few months before that, I'd focused on some classics:
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Village by Ivan Bunin
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
I read quite a bit and love it; if only I could be paid to do it at my own pace and rhythm!
