Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)

This is a unique and spell-binding collection of random meditations on the dreaminess of life; the impossibilities and possibilities of relating, communicating or understanding; the illusions and sensations of ordinary or extraordinary awareness; journeys of the imagination; and so on and so on. It could have gone on forever, and I'm glad it didn't - while I found it relaxing and intriguing and thought-provoking, I could only read it in small dollops, like tasting again and again a favourite ice-cream, both satisfying and too rich to consume in quantity. Despite the fig-leaf of an authorial character, there is no plot, no narrative as such. It's fiction, but not quite as we know it. A fiction of a wandering mind, as it alights on an evanescent series of forms of attention, fantasy and opaque reminiscence without landing on many of the concrete practical details of everyday conscious living. Yes there are glimpses of other people and an office and some urban environment with which this mind is loosely wreathed, but they are ghosts in a spiritual, philosophical and psychological fog through which Pessoa's writing twists and bounces in a kind of Brownian motion of the soul.… (mehr)