Contemporary boredom in the novels of Dulce Maria Cardoso

Abstract

In 2002, Dulce Maria Cardoso published her first novel, Campo de sangue, in which boredom emerges as one of the central themes and, ironically, as a driving force behind the characters’ actions, who live simply to pass the time. From that point on, the theme of boredom begins to permeate the author’s other works, sometimes relating to the endless days of childhood, or more frequently, to the monotonous days so commonly portrayed in modern literature since the 19th century. This essay aims to focus on this latter representation of boredom, drawing from excerpts of the novels Campo de sangue, Os meus sentimentos, O chão dos pardais, and Eliete. For this analysis, a brief connection will be made between the apathy and lack of perspective found in Cardoso’s characters and the end of the western tradition of hope (Fromm, 2015) or the absence of illusions (Pessoa, 2019), as foreshadowed in early 20th-century Portugal by the semiheteronym Bernardo Soares.