Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa

A compelling, timely exploration of Fernando Pessoa’s profound, innovative ideas.

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.