BOOKS
Curator Reviews
Richard Serra
My admiration for Pessoa goes beyond reading his prose. I am in awe of his invention of the heteronym which allows him to be a multitude of authors. Pessoa creates different authors with different languages, voices, putting forth different, often contradictory representations of the world. His strategy is not to be confused with appropriation. All voices/authors are original and distinct. The lesson I took from Pessoa is that I must constantly distance myself from the activity of making so that I can observe my work from a vantage point other than my own.
View Richard Serra's Top 10 Favorite BooksMike White
Like the voice of John Ames, the melancholy Bernardo Soares stays with you forever. I love the values of this book - inertia, passivity, confusion. What an antidote to most things we read. Following around this civil servant as he journals about his mundane, depressing life, I feel weirdly giddy with life’s possibilities. We should all have heteronyms like Pessoa. Transcendent work of imaginative despair.
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