'The Book of Disquiet' is an unusual choice for me. It isn't a novel. It's kind of depressing. It's a self-conscious work of art by Portugal's most important 20th Century writer. It's the kind of thing that would normally elicit a response from me of, "Ugh. Blow something up, already."

'The Book of Disquiet' doesn't have a plot. It's a collection of observations by a fictional character, passages found in scraps in a trunk after Pessoa's death. Collected posthumously, then translated into English for this edition, 'The Book of Disquiet' reads more like poetry than prose. This is a book that you read for the beauty of the language itself. Plot doesn't enter into the discussion.

On the fence about this title? Consider this paragraph, from Note 147:

//Brief, dark shadow of a city tree, light sound of water falling into the sad tank, green with smooth clover - public garden almost at dusk - you are, in this moment, the entire universe for me because you are the full content of my conscious sensation. I don't want any more from life than to feel its loss in these unforeseen afternoons, to the sound of other people's children playing in these gardens fenced in by the melancholy of the streets that surround them, leafy gardens beyond the high branches of the trees along the old sky where the stars begin once again.//

That's it. That's prose as poetry. That's a beautiful immersion, of the sort that awaits you on every page of this remarkable book. 'The Book of Disquiet' is remarkable. It will, undoubtedly, find a place on my list of the best books I'll have read this year.