Some great poets have ended up transcending also as prose writers, with that undeniable lyrical point that embellishes the form towards the bottom through images and symbols brought from those other muses Calliope and Érato. I mean real geniuses from different eras, creators like Becker or the closest Mario Benedetti that, looking out over their disparate times, contributed that brightness of the most human journey through the times. And among all of them it also shines exceedingly Fernando Pessoa. .
I will not be the one to subjectively judge his poetic gifts, as I am not very fond of this artistic expression. But I do know how to appreciate Pessoa's forays into the novel or the epistolary genre, narrative spaces in which he explored and played with those heteronymous characters that marked his work as one of the most unique in XNUMXth century world literature.
While the shadow of the other universal Portuguese of letters, SaramagoIt is very long, the truth is that the disparate conception of the literary work places them in complementary spaces where neither one is overlapped for the greater glory of Portuguese letters.
Top 3 recommended books by Fernando Pessoa
Book of Restlessness
Perhaps Pessoa's ultimate intention was deliberately not to finish this book. What began as a sporadic publication where he was already beginning to play between the heteronym and its consequent orthonym (a game that might end up unifying identities between fiction and reality), gradually materialized in a work in its broadest sense.
Pessoa devoted himself to this narrative for decades, moving between reality and fiction and abounding in sublime nuances about thought, the art of writing, the need to find answers without renouncing that humor that addresses the existential from the assumption of ultimate destiny.
More than a novel, it is a piece, a mosaic of the narrator's life and his mirror of the imagination from which he creates the empathy of characters who end up being discovered as the richness of a human being capable of blending in with everything.
Without knowing if the editions ended up fully respecting the chronology of what was written, its publication is necessary for all those who love literature as the art of creating life and thought.
Love letters
The epistolary genre is rather a narrative resource for those authors who seek to reflect the vast spectrum of human communication. The comings and goings of letters, the silences, the waiting ...
Everything ends up composing a plot that more than ever reaches our reality and sprinkles it with the magic of writing as a calm channel for dialogue. A correspondence where words come from the well of the soul under the demands of the order of written expression. And in that balance, Pessoa is a teacher capable of offering us keys towards the rationalization of love or hate, or towards the naturalization of reason, customs and morality.
An essential book also to reach that point of the author's subjectivity, marked by a mind fully devoted to the cause of literature as a way of life. Sometimes it seems that the letters written to Ophelia Queiroz are from a Pessoa eager to update his beloved about his emotions and experiences.
At other times it seems that Pessoa himself shelters himself in the skin of a heteronym to release the heavy burden of continually being Pessoa, the lucid author besieged by his own wisdom and lucidity.
The anarchist banker
In the very paradox of this title we have already discovered the intention to unravel the social, political and economic mechanisms of capitalism. But it is not a social essay, nor a dissertation on economics.
The issues are addressed from the personal, from the perception of a world given over to liberalism and its aftermath. Liberalism in itself is a euphemism in which the great problems end up being buried under the patina and the excuse of freedom that gives full outlet to human ambitions, good or bad, licit or abominable.
With a satirical humor, Pessoa gives a good review that at times is prescient and that finally makes this book a valuable current reflection.
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