Books like The Book of Disquiet
A Lisbon bookkeeper's fragmentary diary of dreams, observations, and existential unease.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Book of Disquiet
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
Steppenwolf
A middle-aged intellectual in Weimar Germany is torn between bourgeois respectability and the wildness inside him, guided by a mysterious figure through the theatres of his psyche.
Dangling Man
In Chicago in the winter of 1942, Joseph, who has quit his job to wait for his army call-up, keeps a journal of the months in which nothing happens.
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's invented poets, returns to Lisbon from Brazil in 1936 after Pessoa's death, and the ghost of his creator visits him as Salazar's dictatorship tightens.
Too Loud a Solitude
Haňťa has spent thirty-five years in a Prague cellar compacting waste paper into bales, rescuing the books he loves from the press, and is about to be replaced by a machine.
The Moviegoer
A young man in 1960s New Orleans drifts through movies, affairs, and existential malaise, searching for something real in a world of surfaces.
Notes from Underground
A bitter clerk in St. Petersburg writes a confession that swings between self-loathing and grandiosity, inventing the template for every unreliable narrator who followed.
The Tartar Steppe
A young Italian officer is posted to a remote fortress on the edge of a desert where the enemy has been expected for a century, and he learns how to wait.
The Unnamable
A voice, placeless and without a body it can be sure of, talks on and on, trying to say who it is and to stop talking.
Motherhood
A woman in her late thirties decides whether or not to have a child, and the decision becomes an excavation of everything she believes about freedom, selfhood, and time.
Flights
A constellation of short pieces on travel and the human body, from a woman obsessed with anatomical specimens to Chopin's heart being smuggled home to Warsaw and a man whose wife and child vanish on a Croatian island.
All the Names
A clerk in a municipal registry office becomes obsessed with finding the person behind a name, and the search leads him out of bureaucracy and into the world.