The Guardian on Pessoa

The Guardian adds to the recent, and unexpected, surge of interest in Fernando Pessoa:

Although admired throughout Europe for his myriad alter egos – the 72 highly distinct personae he assumed over the course of his writing life – it is Fernando Pessoa’s mellifluous writing on emptiness that continues to haunt my imagination each time I read him.

John Gray has argued, in his introductory essay on Pessoa, that these “heteronyms”, as Pessoa called them, demonstrate that the indvidual subject – the heart of western philosophy – is an illusion, which Pessoa’s heteronymous authorship undercuts. But I would still argue that Pessoa penetrates, more importantly, into the dark side of the human psyche in his posthumously published collection of fragments: The Book of Disquiet – his disconnected ode to emptiness written by his semi-pseudonymous creation Bernando Soares.