"Lisbon, November 1935. Fernando Pessoa is living his last days.Condemned by medicine, the poet and Portuguese writer, rather than dying on a hospital bed, prefers not changing his routine. Barber,
cafes and restaurants in the city center, night walks, alcohol, cigarettes, imaginary friends. The eternal loner, he wants to live until the end in the bubble where he has taken refuge since childhood. Meanwhile, Simão
Cerdeira, a young writer charged by a major Lisbon daily to write his obituary, interviews his loved ones and tracks him down. Shadowing, investigation, testimonies, flashback: Nicolas Barral has, against all expectations, imagined a plot to resemble the life of one of the greatest Portuguese writers of the 20th century and addresses a work as dense as it is dizzying. Who was Pessoa, immense literary chameleon, compulsive writer hiding behind heteronyms & other “shadow writers” of whom he said to be only the humble depositary? Barral does not pretend to solve this seductive mystery, but skilfully puts it into images. Better, he manages to interfere in the singular universe of a man who has searched all his life to disappear, to be just a shadow in the decor, a passerby passing by, a pseudonym, to best embody the nickname given to him by his office colleagues, “Mr Nobody”."
heteronym def:
#1: each of two or more words which are spelled identically but have different sounds and meanings, such as tear meaning ‘rip’ and tear meaning ‘liquid from the eye’.
#2: each of two or more words which are used to refer to the identical thing in different geographical areas of a speech community, such as nappy and diaper.
pseudonym def:
a fictitious name, especially one used by an author.
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