Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
By Michael Wood
The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Alfred Mac Adam
Pantheon, 278 pp., $25.00
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 358 pp., $21.95
Pessoa means 'person' in Portuguese and Fernando Pessoa seems to have played every conceivable variation on his name: he was a person; he was not a person; he wrote books under the names of several persons; he unraveled the notion of personality; reconstituted it; became someone, as he says of a mythological figure in one of his poems, because he was no one.
Review, 3781 words
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