It is a collections of one man's thoughts. I did not enjoy it as a novel because it is not a novel.
You can have endless fun with that, if you want. The solution seems to be to take it slowly, almost as if it were actually a calendar.Like much of Pessoa's work, this was published posthumously, so there are a lot of arguments about which parts really belong to the book, which are meant to be by Soares and which by Pessoa, and so on, and various rival English translations based on different editions of the original text. Indeed, its supreme quotability is perhaps what undermines it a bit: it can feel at times as though you are reading a tear-off calendar. Rather a negative position, but Soares argues it with a great deal of humour and irony, and this is a book with a quotable sentence or two on every page.
Soares reflects paradoxically on the benefits of not engaging with real life, social interactions, love, travel, the literary world, and all the rest: he steadfastly maintains that it's far more satisfying to live your life in dreams and imagination better to have boredom to dream about escaping from than to achieve something that leaves you disappointed. A collection of short prose pieces - a kind of diary - from the thirties, which Pessoa attributes to one of his heteronyms, "Bernardo Soares", supposedly a somewhat antisocial, depressed bookkeeper in an import/export business in Lisbon's Baixa.
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