"To write a critical life that fully does justice to a figure as complex and multifaceted as Fernando Pessoa is an extremely daunting task. Deeply immersed in Portugal's problematic early twentieth-century politics and in the emergence of a pan-European modernity, Pessoa's vast output of mostly unrealized literary projects ranges from poems, political essays and manifestos to astrology charts, automatic writings, and texts on neopaganism, not to mention the swirling assemblage of prose fragments that somehow constitute The Book of Disquiet. Bartholomew Ryan has succeeded brilliantly, achieving what nobody has dared to attempt before, a comprehensive yet concise map in exquisite English of the life and work of this dreamy, fragmented, ruinous creature of the abyss, who wrote into reality the many-headed monster that is the self."–Jonardon Ganeri, author of 'Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self'
