Au terme d’un repas, un banquier démontre à son convive que ses engagements en matière d’anarchisme n’ont rien à envier à ceux des poseurs de bombe. Il déploie ainsi les trésors d’une rhétorique insidieuse au service de sa personne et s’installe dans de provocants paradoxes. Si ce banquier anarchiste nous enchante par son esprit retors, ses raisonnements par l’absurde et une mauvaise foi réjouissante, la véritable dimension du livre est ailleurs : il s’agit d’un pamphlet incendiaire contre la société capitaliste, ses hypocrisies et ses mensonges. Pessoa y dénonce aussi le pouvoir de l’argent, qui mine de l’intérieur le bien le plus précieux de l’homme : la liberté. « Une délicieuse et profonde sotie. » Télérama « Ce petit traité de philosophie politique, aussi loufoque que logique, est l’un de ses livres les plus drôles. » Lire
Author
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer. It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose. The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.
