A lyrical book in pastiche, this book is discontinuous at times and often devolves into lengthy train-of-thought associations. That is because it is the private art project of the author, derived autobiographically, but in a famously "factless" manner. Pessoa takes the reader through days in his life and in his mind. He writes about his daily life and about the difficult problem of finding the right words for his salient time alive. Since the book was published decades after his death, the prose is often quite haunting.
He often arrives at difficult-to-understand aphorisms that often seem euphoric but also abstract and not literal, per say. To complicate this matter, the prose often devolves into types of poetry without warning. The writer also writes about the autobiographical aspect of his own writing for a kind of meta-meta-narrative effect. He isolates a few general principles from the memoir genre: that the process of understanding the self is quite painful and sorrowful, and that the journey to capture the right words is often an unpredictable and isolating experience.
He explains that he often feels his imagination exists in parallax. He says that his experience of consciousness seems to be in twain with an unpredictable energy that often afflicts him if he is unable to accomplish its goals. He says that he often experiences headaches from overthinking, and when he is in public, he explains about a kind of paranoia. The writer places narrative vignettes throughout the prose and mixes in poetic reflections about time and life.
