'I Know No Pleasure Like That of Books'

All I ask is that a book be well-written and teach me something – two conditions admittedly rather vague and subjective. This is no critical credo and I’m not proposing conditions others should follow. I’m reacting to a second reading of a book I first read more than twenty years ago and found interesting: The Book of Disquiet (trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin, 2003) by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese poet famous for turning out poems by a cast of heteronyms. Pessoa’s book might be likened to Giacomo Leopardi’s much superior prose masterwork, Zibaldone, published in its entirety in English for the first time in 2013. The Italian title is customarily translated “hodge-podge” or “miscellany,” though “grab bag” or “gallimaufry” might lend an appropriately vernacular touch to what is, after all, a vast gathering of fragments. The same applies to The Book of Disquiet. Both are characteristically modern in being unified only by each author’s sensibility. They are books so elastic…