Fernando Pessoa

Reviews / Votes

More than presenting a concise life story of Portugal's most fascinating writer of recent centuries, Bartholomew Ryan draws illuminating connections between the self-described "poet animated by philosophy" and thinkers as diverse as Lenin, Kierkegaard, Gandhi, Nietzsche, Yeats, Eliot, Heidegger, Magris, Joyce and Clarice Lispector. It's a joyous ride through a wild world of ideas, literary experiments and multiple selves. * Richard Zenith, author of Pessoa: An Experimental Life * Comprehensive in its cultural reach, penetrating yet always lucid, this critical study unriddles the enigma of Pessoa and gently guides us through his "multifaceted writing universe". The illustrations place Pessoa in a local context, but more importantly Bartholomew Ryan establishes him, as he deserves, in a modernist priesthood beside James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. * Peter Conrad, author of Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the 20th Century * Probably the key figure in Portuguese literary modernism, Pessoa's approach was unique: he invented dozens of different alter egos for himself with different literary styles and interests. As well as an astonishing achievement, the kind of fragmentary identity he pioneered seems particularly apt for our own age of multiple and fractured selves. Part of Reaktion's Critical Lives series, this shortish book looks like an ideal place to start with Pessoa. -- Mathew Lyons * The Broken Compass * 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, Bimal K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, and author of Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self *