Friday, August 20, 2021

Man of multitudes …

…   Living in Fernando Pessoa’s world. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Zenith’s portrayal of Pessoa and his life is more than a masterpiece of literary biography. More than 1,000 pages long, not one of them wasted, it is a tour de force of cultural history. The task Zenith set for himself was to present a “cinematographic” account of the writer, showing what he looked like, the people he interacted with and the settings in which his life was passed. But Pessoa’s “real” existence unfolded primarily in his imagination, and here Zenith’s achievement is extraordinary. By illuminating this elusive figure Zenith has produced a work in some ways as astonishing as those of Pessoa himself.


Here is my review of Pessoa's Selected Poems.

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