Fernando Pessoa: (Critical Lives)

As a young man, Fernando Pessoa wrote ‘be plural like the universe.’ Staying true to this, he went on to invent more than one hundred fictional alter-egos, which he called heteronyms. This biography, probing Pessoa’s experience and imagination of reality, navigates the poet’s early days in Lisbon and South Africa, reveals a philosopher-poet and pioneer of Portuguese modernism, and delves into the birth of Pessoa’s heteronymic universe. Bartholomew Ryan traverses Pessoa’s writings on evolving radical politics and his messianic dream of an empire of poets, his ventures into esoteric realms and his expertise in astrology. The book unravels Pessoa’s real and imaginary relationships, and explores his unfinished prose masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet. This is a compelling, timely exploration of Pessoa’s profound and innovative ideas, including his revolutionary concepts of identity and self-multiplicity.

Table of Contents:
Prologue: To Be as Radical as Reality Itself 1 The Early Years: Durban, Lisbon, the World 2 I was a Poet Animated by Philosophy 3 Orpheu and the Birth of Modernism 4 Heteronymy and the Plurality of the Subject 5 Radical Politics and the Fifth Empire 6 The Esoteric Journeys of the Soul 7 Love, Sex, Friendship and Self-Fecundation 8 The Ruin of Disquiet Epilogue: The Death, Afterlife and Reality of Fernando Pessoa Chronology References Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements

About the Author :
Bartholomew Ryan is a philosopher, musician, and researcher based at IFILNOVA, New University of Lisbon. His books include the coedited Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us.

Review :
More than presenting a concise life story of Portugal’s most fascinating writer of recent centuries, Bartholomew Ryan draws illuminating connections between the self-described “poet animated by philosophy” and thinkers as diverse as Lenin, Kierkegaard, Gandhi, Nietzsche, Yeats, Eliot, Heidegger, Magris, Joyce and Clarice Lispector. It’s a joyous ride through a wild world of ideas, literary experiments and multiple selves. Comprehensive in its cultural reach, penetrating yet always lucid, this critical study unriddles the enigma of Pessoa and gently guides us through his “multifaceted writing universe”. The illustrations place Pessoa in a local context, but more importantly Bartholomew Ryan establishes him, as he deserves, in a modernist priesthood beside James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. To write a critical life that fully does justice to a figure as complex and multifaceted as Fernando Pessoa is an extremely daunting task. Deeply immersed in Portugal’s problematic early twentieth-century politics and in the emergence of a pan-European modernity, Pessoa’s vast output of mostly unrealized literary projects ranges from poems, political essays and manifestos to astrology charts, automatic writings, and texts on neopaganism, not to mention the swirling assemblage of prose fragments that somehow constitute The Book of Disquiet. Bartholomew Ryan has succeeded brilliantly, achieving what nobody has dared to attempt before, a comprehensive yet concise map in exquisite English of the life and work of this dreamy, fragmented, ruinous creature of the abyss, who wrote into reality the many-headed monster that is the self.