Perhaps The Book of Disquiet could never be a novel, or even a fiction: Bernardo Soares is too obviously Fernando Pessoa – obvious by the diffuseness of the prose, written over so many years. Unconvincing pseudonym! But Pessoa preferred the word, heteronym – to be other-named, to be named by the other: how to bear that namelessness which writing also demands – the anonymity which abides in place of the author who would lay claim to the book? What you write will not come back to you; what you sign will not be countersigned. Unless the counter-signature can become a name for the absence of name, the heteronym. Whence Bernardo Soares.
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