I DISCOVERED THE BOOK OF DISQUIET several years ago thanks to a review of it by the British novelist Paul Bailey in which he said “This book has moved me more than anything I have read in years. I have rarely encountered such exhilarating lugubriousness.” My own reading of The Book quickly convinced me that, along with the exhilaration that it so abundantly offers, it was also one of the towering masterpieces of 20th century fiction even if, much like Bernardo Soares himself, it could be so aptly described as “the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins.” I am deeply grateful to the Dalkey Archive Press, and to Jeremy Davies as the editor of its “Scholarly Series,” both for sharing my high estimate of this “unwritten novel” and for responding so enthusiastically to my proposing a critical study devoted entirely to it.
I visited the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon on two occasions while working on my manuscript and am grateful for the friendly reception that I received from its director, Inês Pedrosa. During one of these visits, I also had the pleasure of spending an evening in the Café Martinho da Arcada (where a table is still reserved for Pessoa) with his translator Richard Zenith and Pessoa scholar Rhian Atkin. The greater part of the research for this project as well as the final revision of the manuscript were undertaken in the library of La Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris. My thanks especially to its director Arlette Dabord and to the various members of her staff, especially Cristina Costa, Isabel Jaber, and Isabel De Barros for having made each of my visits such an enjoyable and productive occasion.
As my work neared completion, I benefitted from the careful reading of individual chapters by Pessoans Rhian Atkin, Helena Carvalhao Buescu, and Mariana Gray de Castro as well as by the modernist scholar Luke Thurston. Finally, I would never have been able to undertake this project in the first place if it hadn’t been for the generous support that I continually received from Washington College during the five years that intervened between its inception and its completion.
THOMAS J. COUSINEAU teaches English at Washington College. He is the author of After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement, Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction, and Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard.