"I can't tell which of the three English-language editions of
The Book of Disquiet I've read . . . most accurately conveys the style and spirit of Pessoa, but judging the English alone, Zenith's translation is most compelling. . . . I want Pessoa to be as great as the version Zenith presents." –
Chris Power, New Statesman "A Modernist touchstone . . . no one has explored alternative selves with Pessoa's mixture of determination and abandon . . . In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty, and silence." –
The Daily Telegraph "His prose masterpiece . . . Richard Zenith has done an heroic job in producing the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever." –
The Guardian "
The Book of Disquiet was left in a trunk which might never have been opened. The gods must be thanked that it was. I love this strange work of fiction and I love the inventive, hard-drinking, modest man who wrote it in obscurity." –
Independent "Fascinating, even gripping stuff . . . a strangely addictive pleasure." –
Sunday Times "Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature . . . readers of Zenith's edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa's fractured sensibility . . . the self-revelation of a disoriented and half-disintegrated soul that is all the more compelling because the author himself is an invention . . . Long before postmodernism became an academic industry, Pessoa lived deconstruction." –
New Statesman "Extraordinary . . . a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims."
–
The Observer "Pessoa's rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling, like the touch of a vibrating wire, elusive and persistent like the poetry . . . there is nobody like him."
–
The New York Review of Books "This superb edition of
The Book of Disquiet is . . . a masterpiece." –
The Daily Telegraph "I plan to use this book every year in my course at Yale. Thanks for making it available."
–
K. David Jackson, Yale University
