THE BOOK OF DISQUIET

Name: THE BOOK OF DISQUIET
Author: Fernando Pessoa
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2693-6

by Fernando Pessoa ; edited by Jerónimo Pizarro ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 29, 2017

Cheerlessly brilliant and full of memorable observations (“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily”): just...

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Complete edition of a haunted autobiographical novel—or is it a fictionalized autobiography?—that has emerged as an existentialist classic in the 80-plus years since its author’s death.

Born in Lisbon in 1888, Pessoa might have taught J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon a thing or two about anonymity. He wrote prolifically in three languages but published relatively little, and he hid behind assumed names and identities, some 75 of them in all, which he called “heteronyms.” The present volume is a case in point, written over the course of many years in the person of two such assumed names, Vicente Guedes and, later, Bernardo Soares. As for Guedes, Pessoa opens, “This book is not by him, it is him”: it is a catalog of Kierkegaard-ian moods, of fears and loathings and the constant presence of death in a fundamentally tragic world. “I failed life even before I had lived it, because even as I dreamed it, I failed to see its appeal,” writes Pessoa, and he proceeds to make sun-splashed Lisbon a gray and gloomy place. Though often somber, Pessoa is rarely tiresome; he reflects interestingly on such things as the development of science and aesthetics, the pleasures of wasting time (“For those subtle connoisseurs of sensations, there is a kind of handbook on inertia, which includes recipes for every kind of lucidity”), and, always, mortality: “We are born dead, we live dead, and we enter death already dead.” Readers with a liking for Walter Benjamin and Miguel de Unamuno, Pessoa’s intellectual kin, will find much of interest in Pessoa’s pages, which add up to a sort of philosophical journal more than a storyline as such. And readers already familiar with Pessoa’s poetry will appreciate the care of his language, although some of its fluency is better captured in the Penguin translation of 2001.

Cheerlessly brilliant and full of memorable observations (“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily”): just the thing for the young goth in the family and a fine introduction to a writer deserving more attention.

Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2693-6

Page Count: 608

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.