The Book of Disquiet

Everyone says that Pessoa's unfinished (unfinishable?) Portuguese classic is best taken not whole, but in morsels, chewed and reflected on, and so, having always wanted to read it, that's how I'll begin, with this beautiful new edition, the most complete yet in English of a purposefully incomplete work scribbled in obscurity and published long after its author's death. Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of identities, constructed this book from fragments, bits of observation, philosophy, and daydream. Two sample sentences give a hint of its mood of melancholy paradox: "Enthusiasm is sheer vulgarity." "To abdicate is to act."