Cidade Silvestre, Ciudad Salvaje: Lisboa en una novela de Lídia Jorge

Abstract

In her novel Noticia da Cidade Silvestre, the Portuguese writer Lidia Jorge presents the city of Lisbon in the period following the “Revolution of the Carnations”. The protagonist Júlia Grei leads the reader on an excursion through Lisbon at a time when the city is undergoing a profound crisis of identity, as the consolidation of democracy takes hold after decades of dictatorship. The novel denounces the shortcomings and contrasts of the city during its modernization, which fails to hide the poverty, hunger and degradation which are prevalent despite efforts of renewal. The protagonist reveals working class Lisbon, the underworld of prostitution, political shifts and a changing social order from a feminist perspective. The city, contaminated by natural elements, is anything but an idyllic sylvestran paradise. In this Lisbon, nature is a destructive force which converts the city into an urban jungle inhabited by creatures with animal-like characteristics, a “wild city”.