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The Maias
Author: Eca de Queiroz
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
Cover design: David Bird
Cover illustration: Jean-Auguste Ingres
Winner of PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize for 2008.
Winner of The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for 2008
Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900) is rightly considered to be Portugal's greatest nineteenth-century novelist. This, his undoubted masterpiece, published in 1888, is a tragi-comedy, offering the reader Eça’s characteristic blend of barbed humour, lyricism and sprightly dialogue, as well as a marvellously diverse gallery of characters – absurd, touching, tragic, vain.
Carlos is the grandson of Afonso da Maia, the last surviving member of one of Lisbon’s wealthiest and most illustrious families. Carlos is good, handsome, clever, eager to contribute something to society, and yet he appears, as he himself puts it, 'to be one of those weak hearts, soft and flaccid, incapable of preserving any true emotion'. Then, one day, walking along Lisbon's grubby streets he sees a woman who seems to him like a goddess who has just stepped down from the clouds. When he finally meets the beautiful Maria Eduarda, the attraction proves to be as mutual as it is profound. In the plenitude of that love, Carlos seems, in his best friend Ega's words, 'a truly fortunate being', until Fate steps in - in the form of a grizzled, left-wing newspaper hack from Paris - and everything unravels.
Reviews
- Keith Richmond in Tribune
- Publishers Weekly* stared review
- Jonathan Keates in the Times Literary Supplement
- Sharon Diamond in The Western Daily Press
- Jose Saramago
- Michael Kerrigan in The Scotsman
- Alan Riding in The New York Times
- Marcelas Valdes in The Nation
- Michael Wood in The London Review of Books
- The Judges of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize.
- Helen Dunmore, novelist and chair of the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
RRP: £15.00
No. of pages: 720
Publication date: 14 March, 2007
Re-print date: unspecified
Catalogue/ISBN no: 978 1 903517 53 6
Dedalus World English Language
US rights sold to New Directions
Buy from: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com