The Maias [Paperback]

José Maria de Eça de Queirós (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 30, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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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Review

Eça de Queirós bears comparison with Balzac and Flaubert. -- The Sunday Times [London]

Margaret Jull Costa's new translation...is vastly more readable than the other version now available in English. -- Harold Bloom

Queirós is far greater than my own dear master, Flaubert. -- Zola

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Product Details

• Paperback: 596 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; Reprint edition (July 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811216497
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216494
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #720,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Portuguese

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest of nineteenth-century novels, spellbindingly put into English, February 16, 2010

By 

Michael Steinberg (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Maias (Paperback)

If Eça de Queirós had been English, Russian, or French he would be world famous and "The Maias" would be universally recognized as one of the greatest novels ever written. It's a stinging picture of Portugal in the 1870s, its still-wealthy aristocracy alternating between vapid love affairs and wittily despairing conversations about the impossibility of being anything or anyone in such a hopeless country. It's an affectionate but honest portrait of two friends, both of them gifted and both of them without the seriousness to live up to their gifts, and a portrait of Lisbon, a once great imperial capital by then in terminal decline. It's an intense and passionate love story, told with a frankness about physical love that breaks every stereotype there is about nineteenth century prudery. In 600 pages it gives us a whole world and a crowd of memorable people, all of them seen with both unsparing clarity and great love. Yet for all of its passion and sadness the book is written with a light touch; some of the early chapters are high comedy, and there can be few masterpieces of fiction that are as enjoyable to read. This cannot be recommended highly enough, and Margaret Jull Costa's brilliant translation, though a little heavy on the exclamation points, has been preferred by all the reviewers to the translation available from Penguin.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best of 19th Century Writing, June 18, 2011

By 

trilingual1946 "tri" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Maias (Paperback)

It's a shame Eça de Queirós wrote in a "small" language. It's taken forever to get a fine translation in English of his greatest book, "The Maias." Set in the milieu of the 19th century Portuguese aristocracy (already an exotic world for English-speakers), "The Maias" tells the tale of three generations of a great and noble family, following its decline and fall. It sounds gloomy, but that's not the case at all -- the book brims with humor and affection for the main characters, even as it gleefully skewers the pretensions, follies and small-mindedness of the decadent Portuguese upper classes. Eça is absolutely masterful in his powers of description, whether of individuals or decor, of scenery or gastronomy. Although it's a sprawling saga, the action moves along and Eça easily maintains the reader's interest as the story progresses to its scandalous and tragicomic end. Meanwhile, the reader has been pulled into a truly vanished world of endless fascination.

Lovers of Jane Austen are especially likely to enjoy "The Maias." The environment and social class of Eça's characters are grander than Austen's, and the book's scale is much larger, but Eça shares Austen's gift of being able to portray his characters' foibles and weaknesses without hating them or making them mere caricatures. Austen and Eça have very similar senses of irony. (Eça spent years living in England, so it's likely he knew Austen's work.) Some of Eça's earlier works, like "The Crime of Father Amaro," are more bitter and sardonic, but by the time he wrote "The Maias" he seems to have mellowed and grown more affectionate and forgiving towards his declining homeland and its vapid society.

Those who love this masterpiece will enjoy many of Eça's other books, which fortunately have been translated in the past few years by the same talented translator. It's a joy to have the works of one of the world's greatest writers finally available to the English-reading public!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, but..., December 27, 2011

By 

J. C. Beadles - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Maias (Paperback)

This is a beautifully written novel(I don't read Portuguese, so I have to assume this is an accurate translation), but I just could not get into this work and gave up after about 100 pages. The pace is too languid and the characters are not that interesting or appealing. The back cover cites a review comparing Queiros to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. Well, I've read a lot of Dickens and Tolstoy and some Balzac and Queiros does not compare to any of those giants. I would rather spend my time reading Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac.