ABSTRACT
The Book of Disquiet is unlike any other book. As such, if one is to read it at all, that is, try to understand it on its own grounds, specific protocols for reading become necessary. Pessoa spent much of his life writing an enormous variety of works: poems, essays, a play, film scripts, commercial slogans, and what he imagined would be the Book of Disquiet. One of Pessoa's excesses is the construction of the heteronyms. Hardly any discussion of his work neglects to mention them and most present it as the distinguishing feature separating Pessoa from all other modernist writers. In his dense and wide-ranging, though short, review of the Book of Disquiet George Steiner highlighted its fragmentary nature: The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The poem has always been controversial and critics have often disagreed sharply on its merits, as Holly A. Laird has shown.
