Cousineau, Thomas J. An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.

Abstract

Bernardo Soares’s remark that “anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or nothing, a path or a problem” may serve to illustrate Thomas Cousineau’s critical move in his recent book An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Without departing from major concerns and theoretical trends that have dominated much of pessoano scholarship around The Book of Disquiet since its first edition in 1982, Cousineau’s study nevertheless offers a significant change of perspective within this framework, and delivers what it promises: an Ariadne’s thread to orient the reader through Pessoa’s labyrinthine prose work.