Published posthumously, The Book of Disquiet is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, who introduced it as a "factless autobiography."

[1] Teresa Sobral Cunha, who edited the first version with Jacinto do Prado Coelho and Maria Aliete Galhoz in 1982, considers there to be two authors of The Book of Disquiet: Vicente Guedes in the first phase (in the 1910s and 1920s), and the aforementioned Bernardo Soares (late 1920s and 1930s).

The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies – wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis – inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion.

"It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991.

Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valéry's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal.