"If we accept that biography, as Julian Barnes once wrote, is, at best, 'a collection of holes tied together with string,' how does one go about writing a biography of a person allergic to personhood?"

"That Pessoa’s name is Portuguese for 'person' must have given him perverse satisfaction, he who wrote the word 'me' in quotation marks. 'I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,' he wrote. 'I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me.' Or he was 'the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.' Or, he wrote in a poem, 'merely the place / Where things are thought or felt.' His heteronyms were addicted to their obscurity, vain about their privacy and pained when forced to 'publish' their work. It’s the self conceived as a lump of sugar; it must be dissolved to be tasted."

From "‘Pessoa’ Is the Definitive and Sublime Life of a Genius and His Many Alternate Selves" a review of "Pessoa: A Biography" in the NYT. 

"His heteronyms" refers to the personas Fernando Pessoa adopted in his writings.

Here's the masterpiece: "The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition." I put it in my Kindle. Excerpt:

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does. 

I do not dream of possessing you. What would be the point? It would be tantamount to translating my dream for the benefit of a plebeian. To possess a body is to be banal in the extreme. To dream of possessing a body is perhaps, were such a thing possible, even worse; it would mean dreaming oneself banal — the supreme horror.