From the contents of that trunk was compiled Pessoa’s most celebrated masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet—a manuscript that was never finished, never arranged, and not published until almost half a century after his death. It resists all attempts at classification. Part diary, part prose poetry, and part philosophical meditation, it consists of five hundred loosely connected vignettes touching on everything from the tedium of office life to the superiority of dreams over lived experience, from writing as a form of self-erasure to the protagonist’s mournful meanderings through twilit streets. The sole unifying feature of this “factless autobiography,” beyond its febrile musicality, is the nebulous purgatory of being alive without quite living, of observing reality through the eyes of a detached, chronically melancholic voyeur.