How to read and how not to read Pessoa's Book of Disquiet

First of all, Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa), though hard to classify, is surely not a novel - I would call it a book-length prose poem. Its history is strange: Apparently Pessoa began writing this work in a series of scraps, almost like daily diary entries, each on a separate piece of paper, and he stashed these scraps away in a trunk or suitcase. The first - among with I read yesterday - were written in 1913, when he was in his 20s; the last in the year of his death (1935) when he was in his 40s. They were published posthumously, and the various editions differ from one another, as there are a million editorial decisions to make about order of composition. All that said, what I read yesterday - about 50 pp or about 10 percent of the work - was quite strange and unusual and sometimes difficult to comprehend. The overall mood is one of extreme self-effacement and yearning for a distant and inaccessible romantic ideal - pretty familiar stuff in the poetry of a lonely, bookish 25-year-old. It seems obvious today that the inaccessible ideal is a man, not a woman, which explains in part F'P's overwhelming guilt and need for secrecy and reluctance to publish his work. It was difficult enough to write about homosexual themes in the early 20th century - see the vast circumlocutions of Proust. the long silence of Forster, the fate of Wilde - and then imagine how much more difficult it would be to defy this taboo in the highly repressive climate of Portugal. I doubt I'll finish reading this book; it's clearly not meant to be read straight through as one would read a novel - there's no plot, no characters, no story arc - it's more like a series of meditations, many - most - of them strange and beautiful. I have opened to a page at random from among those I read yesterday and here's a quote, which is the best way to give a sense of FP's writing and his struggle: "So why am I writing this book? Because I recognize that it is imperfect. Were I to dream it, it would be perfection; the mere fact of writing makes it imperfect, which is why I am writing it."