If he was empty, as he liked to claim, it was not the emptiness of a void but of a stage, where these selves could meet and interact. A self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of feelings and the humdrum reality of life, 'The Book of Disquiet' is a classic of existentialist literature. Pessoa even imagined encounters among them, and allowed them to comment on one another’s work. They were fully fledged characters, endowed with their own biographies, philosophies, and literary styles. But the major heteronyms he used in his mature work were more than jokey code names. His love of invented names began early: at the age of six, he wrote letters under the French name Chevalier de Pas, and soon moved on to English personae such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon. In his manuscripts, and even in personal correspondence, Pessoa attributed much of his best writing to various fictional alter egos, which he called “heteronyms.” Scholars have tabulated as many as seventy-two of these. In addition to the size and the disorder of the Pessoa archive, there is another confounding level of complexity: it is, in a sense, the work of many writers.
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