/lit/ - Literature

it's ok

i read a couple of bits here and then
i guess i'm like a third through

it's fine so far and i like his voice
i can't imagine how you could read it cover to cover straight though. this has taken me like a year

>>13538695
I read it in a month on an off. When i was reading it i was reading 50-100 pages.

>>13538695
Is there a particular reason it seems way better to read on and off? I enjoy reading when I want to, but I don't want to that often.

>the constant misogyny

>the constant misogyny

Hit with ball in the face, not shot in the back

>>13538686
Going to read this and The Tartar Steppe back to back.

Wish me luck!

>the constant misogyny

i'm reading this either next week or the week after. what am i in for?

Can anyone tell me why this is so difficult? It's a modern translation (usually meaning basic language), is fiction and isn't that long. I haven't read it, but it's piqued my interest.

>>13540270
It isn't at all, who said it was?

>>13539829
lots of whining.
it's great up until 2/4 of the way, after that starts to get old

>>13540347
some guy on the internet

What's it about anyway

>>13538695

Did the same thing but I made it about halfway through. Would read a page everyday first thing when i woke up but haven't picked it up again in a few years.

"I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted – and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment – that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.

But as an ironic spectator of myself, I’ve never lost interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion, I have the special delight of already enjoying the disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet that makes the sweet sweeter by way of contrast. I’m a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement.

My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent creature, is to be able to desire only what I know I’ll never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street and imagine for the slightest moment, however nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it’s a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she’ll meet the man who’s obviously her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix the two things, since I’m romantic in myself and a stranger to myself, and I turn the page to yet another irony.

Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head) produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.

>>13540557
But how often, in the middle of this peaceful dissatisfaction, my conscious emotion is slowly filled with a feeling of emptiness and tedium for thinking this way! How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life – a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness! How often, waking up for a moment from this exile that’s me, I get a glimpse of how much better it would be to be a complete nobody, the happy man who at least has real bitterness, the contented man who feels fatigue instead of tedium, who suffers instead of imagining he suffers, who kills himself, yes, instead of watching himself die!

I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.

I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit – the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image – not without truth, but with lies mixed in – I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it’s nothing. And a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep."

>>13538686
>Whatever you do, don't read it.
That's what people said about Rokko's Basilisk and honestly I just found that an interesting idea. What is it about this book that's really so damn disturbing?

>>13540557
>>13540574
Is the entire book like this? It seems like heavy stuff but I can't imagine you'd get much of value out of it.

>>13539487
pessoa wrote like that

>>13539487
I'm also reading it like that. It's made of short fragments without an advancing plot, some fragments are very contemplative, others are more violent and transgressive, some are poetic.

>>13538686
What a great way to make us read the book. You have doomed us all OP.

This book didn't really affect me that much. Except the part where he talks about the passage of time and how he weeps over it.

>>13539808
>>13539533
misogyny is shit for incel cucks
don't be an incel cunt
don't play one on the internet.

>>13540379
I hate when you get 8/16 of the way through a book and it goes to shit

I tried it but only made it about fifty pages in before deeming it to be nothing more than the same depressing vignettes repeated. Change my mind? I would love to find as much joy(?) in this as everyone else has

>>13538686
Nice try, Pessoa. We're not reading your shitty book. Stop shilling.

Does the translation do the Portuguese justice or should I add this to my list of books I'll leave until the unlikely event I learn the language?

>>13542821
>Falling for the "don't read translations" meme

>>13540557
Yep, that's going on my tinder profile

>>13542863
I'll take that as a yes

>>13539505
>>13539533
>>13542377
>muh soggy knees

I grow tired of these antics.

I never come here, I drop in for one night and this cunt drops my life story in 2 posts

Ordering it now. Wish me luck.

>>13540392
It's easy reading, it just doesn't have a clear narrative. Maybe that confused guy on the internet

>>13539533
C H I S W I C K

>>13540347
Literally the first post on this thread said they can't imagine ever finishing it cover to cover

>>13545547
That's not because it's difficult, it's because it's much better to read a few pages from at a time. You really want to make this book last, don't rush through it. It's an amazing book to have on your bedside, like The Waste Books or Montaigne's Essays.
I started this book on 22nd February this year and am only 300 pages in, although I did have a busy period where I could only really read my main books. In the meantime I have read 24 books from start to finish alongside it, including Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment and I'm 400 pages into Infinite Jest (i.e. I'm not just reading novellas).

Portuguese anon here, I've never actually read the book. Should I bother? His other stuff is pretty decent, but I've never bothered to check up on his "Bernardo Soaresesque" rants.