Many of the greatest Portuguese writers of the last century are Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of names. This audiobook is presented as having been written by Pessoa’s fictional friend, Bernardo Soares. Adam Sims narrates the 481 sections – some as short as a single sentence – with a detached air appropriate to someone to whom identity is no longer an interesting question. The narration is not flat, just somewhat cool, befitting the emotional level of the text. There’s more than a hint of Marcus Aurelius in this series of meditations on life, human experience, and how to endure them both. This is an audiobook that might be best heard bit by bit, rather than in one extended session.

Having plumbed the depths with its fine unabridged recordings of Samuel Beckett and Marcel Proust, Naxos brings still more existential dimension to the world of audiobooks with this debut of Portuguese author Pessoa’s enigmatic, incomparable masterpiece, ably narrated by Sims. Assembled from trunks of papers – ‘a definitive collection of dregs’ – after the author’s death in 1935, Pessoa’s magnum opus drifts freely between reveries, renunciations, meditations and maxims, often saturated with an air of disillusionment, alienation, and malaise. And yet this ‘saddest book in Portugal’ is oddly comforting, peering into the darkest recesses of life with an indefatigable appreciation for the absurd and reverence for mystery. Though not lacking in irony or effect, Sims’s reading maintains a confiding, conversational humility that allows Pessoa’s own searching intellect and paradoxical moods to hold sway. Rather than listening cover to cover, Pessoa himself might have suggested sampling the book on shuffle play, or while falling asleep as an introduction to dreaming. Sims’s candid rendition of Richard Zenith’s 2001 translation will admirably suit the purpose.