Pessoa: A Biography - Richard Zenith Audiobook

Written by Richard Zenith
Read by Nigel Patterson
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

[Chapterized m4b, broken into 4 files]

Like Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Richard Zenith’s Pessoa (a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography) immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

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 met his match.

Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius.

42 hours and 45 minutes

©2021 Richard Zenith (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books