There is a particular feeling that settles on a person about three months into living in Lisbon. The novelty has worn off. The supermarket no longer requires translation apps. The neighbour with the small dog has been greeted enough times that not greeting her would now be rude. And somewhere in that quiet acclimatisation, a question begins to surface that the brochure stage of moving never raises.
What does it mean to actually live here?
Not visit. Not own property. Not hold a residence card. Live. The distinction matters, and most foreign residents discover it about a year in, often through a small social misstep that lands harder than it should. A comment about the food. A complaint about a tradesman’s timing. A throwaway joke about the bureaucracy. The Portuguese are famously polite, which is not the same as forgiving, and the look that follows is brief but instructive.
Portugal does not require its newcomers to assimilate. It does, however, notice who is paying attention.
This is a country that thinks about itself in centuries rather than quarters. It has watched empires rise inside its borders and slip out of them, and the consequence is a national temperament that is unhurried, ironic, occasionally melancholic, and quietly proud in a way that does not announce itself. There is a word, saudade, that gets quoted to death in travel writing about Portugal. It is not quite the right word for what a foreign resident eventually feels. The word for that feeling is closer to pertencer, to belong, and it is something a person earns slowly, by being present and curious and willing to be wrong about things.
The Portuguese have spent five centuries writing about themselves with unusual honesty, and almost none of it gets read by the foreigners who arrive carrying business cards. That is a small tragedy, because reading the country before living it is the single most considerate thing a newcomer can do. It is also, frankly, more rewarding than any amount of pastel de nata tourism.
What follows is a short reading list. Read three before arrival. Read the rest across the first year. You will be a better neighbour for it, and quite probably a happier resident.
To understand the Portuguese mind
The interior register first. One novel, one history. The novel is how the Portuguese think when no one is watching. The history is how the country got here.
1. The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa Lisbon’s most famous resident barely left his neighbourhood. This is the book he wrote about it. A loose, beautiful, fragmentary diary by a fictional assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares, full of long looks out of café windows and short opinions about everything. You will not finish it. No one finishes it. You will keep it on your bedside table for the rest of your life and read three pages at a time. It is the closest thing the Portuguese language has to a national interior monologue. The Margaret Jull Costa complete edition for New Directions is the version to buy.
2. The Portuguese: A Modern History — Barry Hatton The single best general history of contemporary Portugal in English, written by a British AP correspondent who has lived in Lisbon for the better part of thirty years and clearly likes the place. Hatton walks the reader through the long Salazar dictatorship, the colonial wars, the Carnation Revolution, EU accession, and the years since, without ever sounding like a textbook. If you read only one nonfiction book on this list, make it this one. He has also written a more recent companion volume, Queen of the Sea, on the history of Lisbon itself, which is worth picking up once the first book has done its work.
To understand the country’s history
Two books on the moments that still shape how Portugal sees itself. One novel set inside the dictatorship. One history of the day it ended.
3. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis — José Saramago Portugal’s Nobel laureate, who won the prize in 1998. Most lists send you to Blindness, which is a great novel set nowhere in particular. This one is the better introduction, because it is set entirely in 1936 Lisbon, as fascism is hardening across Europe and a doctor returns from sixteen years in Brazil to find his country quietly suffocating. Saramago’s long, flowing sentences take a few pages to acclimatise to. After that, it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. The Giovanni Pontiero translation is the one to read.
4. The Carnation Revolution — Alex Fernandes The 1974 revolution that ended Western Europe’s longest dictatorship, told as the genuine thriller it was. Fernandes is a Portuguese writer based in London, and the book moves hour by hour through 25 April 1974 as a small group of young army captains overthrew the regime with almost no blood spilled and a great many carnations. You will understand Portugal’s relationship to its own democracy considerably better after reading this. You will also understand why 25 April is still treated as a sacred date by the country’s older generations.
To understand its literature properly
Three novelists for three different Portugals. Eça for the long nineteenth century. Tabucchi for the dictatorship years. Lobo Antunes for the colonial inheritance no one talks about at dinner.
5. The Maias — Eça de Queirós Portugal’s nineteenth-century answer to Tolstoy, by a writer who spent most of his career in the diplomatic service abroad, in Havana, London, and Paris, mocking the country he loved. A long, witty, gorgeously written novel about three generations of a Lisbon family, full of bad romantic decisions, beautiful Lisbon set pieces, and quietly devastating social commentary. The Margaret Jull Costa translation won the PEN Translation Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld. She is the best literary translator working in Portuguese, and her version is a small miracle.
6. Pereira Maintains — Antonio Tabucchi Tabucchi was Italian, not Portuguese, but he spent much of his life in Lisbon, taught Portuguese literature, married a Portuguese woman, and died in the city in 2012. Pereira Maintains is a slim, hypnotic book about a quiet newspaper editor in 1938 Lisbon who discovers, page by page, that there are some things a person cannot let pass. It is short, beautifully strange, and one of those books that lodges itself in your head for years.
7. The Land at the End of the World — António Lobo Antunes Portugal’s other great living novelist alongside the late Saramago, and one of the most distinctive prose stylists in any European language. This one is a hallucinatory monologue by an army medic returned from the colonial war in Angola, addressed across a single long evening to a woman in a bar. It is not an easy read. It is not meant to be. It is the book to read once you have lived in Portugal for a year and realised that the country’s relationship to its empire is more complicated than the polite version suggests. The Margaret Jull Costa translation, again, is the one.
To enjoy yourselves
Two books to read for pleasure, with the bonus of teaching you a great deal about Portugal along the way. A detective novel and a cookbook.
8. A Small Death in Lisbon — Robert Wilson A confession: this one is a detective novel. It is also one of the best evocations of Lisbon ever written by a foreigner. Wilson is a British author who has lived in Portugal for years, and he knows the city in the way only someone who has wandered its hills at night for years can. The novel weaves between 1941 and 1999, working through Portugal’s wartime tungsten trade with Nazi Germany on one timeline and a Lisbon murder investigation on the other. It won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999. Read it on the plane. You will arrive understanding more about wartime Lisbon’s specific brand of moral ambiguity, and which neighbourhoods to wander first, than any guidebook would teach you.
9. The New Portuguese Table — David Leite The cookbook to buy your spouse. Leite is American-born to Azorean parents, a James Beard award winner, and the book won the IACP Julia Child First Book Award. Anthony Bourdain wrote the introduction. It is organised by Portugal’s eleven historic regions plus the islands, full of stories about the food and the people cooking it, and the recipes work in an American kitchen. You will become a person who makes proper caldo verde on a Sunday in winter. This is a quietly happy outcome.
A note on what is not here. Os Lusíadas, Camões’ national epic, has been left off because life is short. The more avant-garde Pessoa has been left off because Disquiet is more than enough Pessoa for a first encounter. Most contemporary Portuguese poetry has been left off because poetry in translation is difficult and a person should pick their own poets in their own time. Clarice Lispector has been left off because she was Brazilian, and the Brazilian tradition deserves its own list.Read three of these before you arrive. Read the rest in the first year. You will be a better neighbour for it. And on a Sunday in February, when the rain is coming sideways down the Rua de São Bento and you have a pot of caldo verde on the stove and Pessoa on the table and a Lisbon you are beginning to understand outside the window, you will know what pertencer is starting to feel like.
