At a glance this has the makings of an interesting book. Its author was an eccentric Portuguese poet and boulevardier by the name of Fernando Pessoa, a man who made his bread doing casual translation work, never married and (it is “probable but not provable”) died a virgin. In the ample free time this left him Pessoa wrote fake diary entries and pseudonymous articles under as many as seventy-five pen names—leaving to posterity a vast webwork of texts in which his fake authors foment feuds and form friendships among themselves and some of them (wheels within wheels) even invent fake authors of their own. The Book of Disquiet, disappointingly, does not take us on a tour of this labyrinthine literary universe but instead collects all the texts penned by one of Pessoa’s pet pseudonyms, the crabby and melancholic poet Bernando Soares. Soares' book reads as a sort of diary or journal though, according to an apologetic editorial foreword, it was put together more or less at random. The original texts, we are told, were published almost 50 years after Pessoa’s death in 1935 and came down to the editors as a trunk of old scribbled-on envelopes, napkins, receipts, and so on, offering no definitive means of organisation. How romantic. The problem is that the texts themselves are boring beyond all endurance. Soares devotes most of his pages to simple descriptions of how depressed he is and the rest (as though in his depression he were now avenging himself on his readers) to nincompoopish philosophical homilies. To be clear, the problem is not that Soares is depressing but that he is boring. Depression, after all, is fertile ground for literature. Borges said that unhappiness is given to the artist like clay to mold into his art. Orwell, a political polemicist, molded his into a nightmare vision of the future as, “a boot stomping on a human face—forever.” Kafka, an existentialist and a pessimist, gave us a portrait of the universe as an incomprehensible and hostile place in which the individual was lonely, perplexed and threatened. Beckett, the absurdist, offered object lessons on facing the crushing opposition of an irrational cosmos with an equally irrational resilience. Pessoa simply lets his clay drop onto the page with a dull thud. “Rationalize my sadness?” he asks in one entry. “What for, if rationalization takes effort? Sad people can’t make an effort.” The thought is not elaborated upon. “The only attitude worthy of a superior man,” he declaims in another, trying on his philosophers’ hat, “is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.” Why is that? The thought is not elaborated upon. At another point (a breaking point for any reader with an ounce of good taste) Pessoa trowels allegory onto his self-pity, describing himself as, “a poor orphan shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness, and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy." The Book of Disquiet runs on in this fashion for 640 pages.