The Book of Disquiet

The novel uses Soares’s life in Lisbon to convey how urban life in a modern society breeds alienation and discontent. The minimalism of Soares’s material existence on the Rua dos Douradores offers a nearly blank backdrop against which his rich interior life unfolds. The fragmentary and almost plotless novel enacts the difficulty of communicating that interior life to others.

Soares lives in a tiny, barren flat by himself; the space holds a bed in which he lies awake staring at the light, a desk where he works on his book, and a window where he stands and stares out at the city. When he isn’t home, Soares goes to the office where he works as a bookkeeper, a vocation that rarely satisfies him. Otherwise, he wanders the city streets or visits cafés, studying the buildings, roofs, and passersby. This is the substance of Soares’s life in the material world—where tangential references to minor characters like his boss Vasques and “Moreira the head bookkeeper” comprise his only social interaction (17). The banal predictability of his routines and the lack of other players in his story conveys his loneliness and his sense of futility. Soares’s circumstances emblematize an idea of city life that took shape around the turn of the 20th century, as accelerating industrialization led millions of Europeans to leave the countryside, where they had worked and lived in close-knit communities, for cities where they worked in factories and offices and lived among a dazzling multitude of strangers. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx describes the alienation of factory labor, in which the worker is involved in only one small part of the production process and feels little connection to the finished product. Soares’s bookkeeping work is similar—he performs repetitive, anonymous tasks and is continually reminded that he can be replaced. Outside the office, he is constantly surrounded by people, sounds, and activity, but this urban commotion proves only an ambient reminder of the life he does not have. For this reason he often “imagine[s] being forever free from the Rua dos Douradores” (17) or escaping Lisbon altogether. These however are feats he never accomplishes.

Soares’s story thus captures the irony of modern urban life: The city is the alleged epicenter of culture and connectivity, but Soares always feels “strangely far away” (312) from such communal spheres. He is constantly “on the balcony of life, yes, but not exactly of this life. I’m above life, looking down on it” (312). This metaphor reinforces the repeated images of Soares standing at his window looking out over the city streets. He can visually access the hubbub of urban reality but is never integrated into it. Even when walking on the streets, Soares never interacts with passersby. He is always situated at a remove—looking down on, into, or over at others going about their lives. Modern urban society proves fraudulent. It cannot satisfy its own promises—as the culture divides people by pitting them against each other in a constant race towards financial, vocational, artistic, or even romantic accomplishment. At the same time, Soares is bound by the city. He cannot imagine leaving Lisbon as the city streets offer him so much fodder for the imagination. He is possessive of his surroundings because they present the illusion of tangible reality; but remains in conflict with them as they underscore his solitude.