Customer Reviews

The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life (Dedalus European Classics)

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I'm not much of a reader, I must admit that I usualy only read books which I'm very atracted to, and "The Maias", which I had to read this year for school, seemed boring and a big chalenge, seeing it has 636 pages (at least in the original, portuguese edition). The begining is not very fun, it's about descriptions, but then, after a few pages, the story starts to be very interesting, fun, and even intense. Me, the non-addict reader, read 80 pages a day! I could'n put the book away!!! It was so addicting!
It is great and it is written with such a care and genious!
Eça de Queiros is trully one of the best writters from all times.
Write now, he's my personal favourite, from all the World.
I just have to read all of his books!

ps: this is the 1st time I ever support school on making us read a book, beacause if it was not for the school, this marvelous master-piece would go undiscovered for many!

Anyone who reads classic literature cannot ignore The Maias. Eca de Queiroz's comparison to Balzac and Tolstoy is spot on. Clearly his best novel, the Maias deals brilliantly with the arocratic nature of people. It is extremely well-written, and reads very quickly. This is a must read for anybody who likes 19th century works.

it fills me with enormous joy to see how my favourite novel is appreciated around the world. i think eça would be proud of this.

if the maias were a movie (and i'm sure it will be, sooner or later), it would clearly be a "chick-flick"... from this perspective it wouldn't even be very original. the whole romance is actually quite common and not surprising at all (except for the ending, if you're not familiar with eça's own fears and traumas)... what the maias have of spectacularity is the social portrait of portugal in particular of the lisbon society... eça's characters are so plausible and real, even in present days, that one is forced to believe that they are not the product of an ingenious imagination, but the result of a daily observation. this book can surely transport you to lisbon, as it describes the existing mentality in a city that longs for the glamour and importance of a central european capital, like london or paris. what is impressive is that this sense was already prevailing more than a century ago...

"Of all words of tongue and pen,/the saddest are 'It might have been'" says Bret Harte. I've just finished reading Eça de Queiroz' The Maias, a work poignantly saturated with this feeling of regret. Prepare for the book by listening to Amália Rodrigues, experiencing the feeling of saudade so prevalent in Portuguese artists.

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900) is considered Portugal's greatest novelist, and The Maias (1888) his greatest novel. Other books by de Queiroz are The Sins of Father Amaro (1876) and The Illustrious House of Ramires. The Maias has been brilliantly translated by Patricia MacGowan Pinheiro and Ann Stevens, who have produced an equivalent masterpiece in English.

In its ability to deal with tragic conflict while retaining such an exquisite beauty of form the book reminds me of the Attic drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In a long book (over 600 pages) no detail is forgotten, and a convincing picture of mid 19th century Lisbon is built up. The characters all ring true: I felt I knew them well. The dozens of central characters are all alive, real people with faults, somehow lovable - Eça de Queiros writes with great affection even though he deplores the decay of a once great country. So many of the book's characters seem real, though presented in brief. They come and go and re-appear in a complex tapestry of events which makes them astoundingly like people I have known. Eça de Queiroz has the gift of bringing his world to life and making the reader a part of it. The mood is not tragic: ironic, satiric, even humorous at times, full of regret...let's just say saudade, even though we English speakers don't really know what that means. I was very moved while reading, and for long after. I feel sad that I do not have the ability of a de Queiroz to express what I had felt in reading the book.

Carlos Eduardo de Maia is the sole heir of an ancient, illustrious family. The family hopes and ambitions are dependent on him. Honour is a very real thing in this culture, and Carlos has a lot of expectations to bear. The glorious past and the unsatisfactory present are both with him at all times. A central plot strand of the novel details the incestuous love of Carlos and Maria Eduarda, and the tragedy this brings to all concerned. The affair is skillfully built up, and comes to a shattering, Sophoclean climax.

The Maias is a book which mourns many things. The decadence of Portuguese culture and spirit; the passing of time; the loss of things undone. Carlos and his friend Ega in the end have fulfilled none of their youthful ambitions.

The ending, with the friends Carlos and Ega running after a tram, reminds me of the end of Fellini Satyricon. One is suddenly made to realise that these people who have come to life so convincingly, who share my own pains and regrets, lived more than one hundred years ago. That poignant shock universalises the reading experience. Ambition, the great love of Carlos and Maria Eduarda, the virtues of Alfonso, the literary gifts of Ega, the pretensions and fantasies of so many of the characters, are all futile in the end. Fate, and perhaps some innocent fault of their own, conspires against them. Life wasn't meant to be fair, and looking back is often a bitter affair.

I put the book away with a word of encouragement to Carlos, this imaginary character who died almost a century ago. Don't be too cynical, I say: your gifts are great, and you have achieved much. Visit Maria Eduarda. Encourage Ega to finish his book. We all grow older, duller. What we love inevitably turns to dust. But still: to live! to love!

Finishing this book has been like saying goodbye to friends. Yet these friends: they are so alive, yet so dead, dead in two senses, living so long ago and being characters of fiction. Something that was lost long ago has been lost again today. The train pulls out and leaves someone behind on the platform to whom I can only say goodbye. I too am thinking more of what might have been than of what might be.

During the plague years in Elizabethan England Thomas Nashe expressed the same mood: "Beauty is but a flower,/Which wrinkles will devour./Brightness falls from the air;/ Queens have died young and fair..."

This is a great XIXth Century novel, with all the strenghts and shortcomings. The plot is conventional melodrama, which explains its being presently serialized by Brazilian TV, in an adaptation that has as its chief fault to take the story too much seriously. Eça was, above all, a master of good-naturedly irony,a fact enhanced in this novel by his forswearing the more strict realistic manner of Zola and Flauber in favour of Thackeray's and Dickens'. That explains why, although the novel is full of fin-de-siecle pessimism - above all about the possibilities of a developed bourgeois society in backward Portugal being possible - it's still so damned funny. Eça's irony has only one parallel among his contemporaries, the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis. However, Eça loves too much his creatures to submit them to the bitter and torturing irony of Machado's.Having seem this English translation, I regard it as correct (Eça's plain language requiring no great flights of fancy from the translator) but miss the absence of some footnotes on historical and political matters that could help modern readership to feel more at ease. However, one can still do without them, as Eça's novels - just like Tolstoy's - have the ability to stand on their own feet even today. A must-read.

This novel from the most talented 19th Century Portuguese writer is a pure delight, full of humour, irony on Lisbon high society, poetical descriptions and the story of a great love passion.

A truly wonderful novel on a prominent family in turn of the century Portugal. A tale of Tolstoyan proportion with page turning development of plot, emotions, tremendous humour and a devastating case of incest. One of my all time fave books!

The best fiction book ever written in Portuguese language,only paralleled with those of Dickens.Superb personages,vividly depicted scenes,cleverly crafted dialogues plenty of humour,master vernacular's dominion.A must.

in my opinion "The Maias" is one of the most magnificent novels ever written. Powerful in its drama and brilliant in its wit. I strongly recommend it and suggest that the reader also reads "The Mandarin", again by Eca de Queiroz: unforgetable.

This book is amazing. I won't say too much because I'll just repeat what most people said here, and it is all truth. But I don't agree with Carlos Eduardo. I think the romance part is very deep and realistic, and you can feel the love through the pages. The series was fantastic in my opinion. It represents everything the book has to say. The only modification they did, and I think it was right, was to place the love story of Pedro da Maia and Maria Monforte in present, not just a long flashback as it is in the book. And I think they should make a movie. The series was superb adapting the criticism of Eça's book.