Pessoa

“Finally! A brilliant biography that places Pessoa where he should have always belonged, with Joyce, Proust, and Musil—true giants, none of whom were Nobel laureates.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name “When you consider the fantastically vivid details of Fernando Pessoa’s curious life contained in this biography, and the energetic and elegant quality of the writing, you might wonder if this book is actually a just discovered autobiography, written by one of Pessoa’s heteronyms, ‘Richard Zenith.’ No one, it seems, could know so much or relate it so marvelously unless they had lived inside Pessoa’s head. Zenith’s Pessoa is magnificent.” —Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Be With “Fernando Pessoa was an enigmatic genius with protean powers whose name belongs next to Cervantes, Rabelais, Borges, and Márquez. Richard Zenith is his genius biographer who has given him fresh life. No one on earth knows more about Pessoa. With its historical sweep and novelistic execution, this biography will never be bested.” —William Giraldi, author of American Audacity “A completely superb and magisterial life of Fernando Pessoa. Finally, this extraordinary poet gets the great biography he deserves. Unsurpassable.” —William Boyd, author of Trio Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer—but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has…