ABSTRACT
Fernando Pessoa is not a ghost. The fame that has attached to his name as Portugal's most celebrated twentieth-century author and his own investment in the process of mythologizing have done much to dematerialize him and to render his texts as some sort of rarefied poetic expression. His father died in 1893, and in 1896 the young Pessoa went with his mother, who had married the Portuguese consul in Durban, to a life in South Africa which, if not bereft of privilege, constantly exposed him to the contradictions of colonial rule and to the contrasts and conflicts between Portugal and England. The Book of Disquiet is not a book but an anti-book. However, the claim that the Book of Disquiet is an anti-book, following observations made by Richard Zenith, has to do not so much with the editorial history of the text, but rather with its fragmentary nature and its refusal of systematic thought.
