The Maias - Softcover

De Eça De Queirós, José Maria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216497 ISBN 13: 9780811216494

Publisher: New Directions, 2007

Synopsis

Set in Lisbon at the close of the nineteenth century, The Maias is both a coming-of-age novel and a passionate romance.

Our hero Carlos Maia, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Portugal, is rich, handsome, generous and intelligent: he means to do something for his country, something useful, something that will make his beloved grandfather proud. However, Carlos is also a bit of a dilettante. He drifts along, becoming a doctor and pottering about in his laboratory, but spends more and more time riding his splendid horses or visiting the theater, having affairs or reading novels. His best friend and chief partner in crime, Ega, is likewise engaged in a long summertime of witticisms and pleasure. Carlos however is set on a dead reckoning course with fate―with the love of his life and with a terrible, terrible secret...

Newly translated by the acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa (translator of José Saramago's Blindness), New Directions is proud to bring Eça de Queirós' brilliant prose to life for American readers for the first time.

About this title

About the Authors

One of the leading intellectuals of the "Generation of 1870," José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, and for most of his life also worked as a diplomat, in Havana, London, and Paris.

Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Javier Marías and José Saramago, lives in England.

Reviews

Starred Review. A veteran translator of Saramago and Pessoa, Jull Costa delivers Quierós's 1888 masterpiece in a beautiful English version that will become the standard. Rich scion Carlos de Maia—like his best friend, writer João da Ega—is an incorrigible dabbler caught in the enervated Lisbon of the 1870s. His parentage is checkered: Carlos's mother runs off with an Italian, taking his sister, Maria, but leaving Carlos with his father, Pedro, who soon shoots himself. Raised by Pedro's father, Afonso, the adult Carlos returns with a medical degree to live with Afonso in the family's cursed Lisbon compound. His very romantic, very doomed affair with Madame Maria Eduarda Gomes sets in motion a train of coincidences, deftly prefigured, that resonantly entwines Carlos's fate with that of his father and spreads all of Portuguese society before the reader. Quierós has a magisterial sense of social stratification, family and the way eros can make an opera of private life. The novel crystallizes the larger unreality of an incestuous society, one that drifts, even the elite heatedly acknowledge, into decline. The neglect of the big Iberian 19th-century novelists—Galdós, Clarín and Quierós—remains a puzzle. This novel stands with the great achievements of fiction. (July)
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Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811216497
• ISBN 13: 9780811216494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 596