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Title: The Maias (Penguin Classics) by Eca De Queiros, Ann Stevens, Patrica McGowan Pinheiro, Jose Maria Eca de Queiros ISBN: 0-14-044694-X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: July, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.73 (11 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A cut above the average
Comment: I knew nothing of Eca de Queiros before surfing the Amazon website, and was glad that I bought and read this book. "The Maias" is not without its irritations - at times the narrative becomes bogged down and therefore, I felt like I was merely "ticking over" until the next interesting sequence arrived. Added to which, I found this edition somewhat frustrating, as it is very lightly edited (helpful footnotes only appear towards the end of the book, and up until that point, as my knowledge of Portuguese history is not as good as it should be, I found myself having to pass over some references in the hope that they were not crucial to the overall story) and there are irritating printing errors scattered through the early pages.
However, on the whole Eca de Queiros's novel is challenging and interesting on a number of levels. The author had a keen wit, a finely-tuned sense of irony and, at times a deeply thoughful and observant insight into human behaviour which enriches the book for the reader.
The first hundred pages are essentially scene-setting, a description of the recent history of the Maia family. From there, the reader is given a fly-on-the-wall account of the habits and attitudes of a group of wealthy young Portuguese men-about-town. Eca de Queiros spares nothing in exposing the hypocrisy and double-standards of Portuguese high society - married women are fair game to these men, and yet at the same time they are outraged if the same married women are not "faithful" to them. There is a powerful message about the decay of, perhaps not morality, but certainly of honor, and exposure of the inequality between the sexes: Carlos's mother is branded a whore for being unfaithful to his father, yet the men hop in and out beds with little fear of social shame. No need to spoil the ending, but the author does not let his characters get away with all this without some repercussions.
Much of "The Maias" seemed to me to be very similar to Emile Zola's writing - "Nana" in particular, and so I suppose it could be argued that Eca de Queiros merely comes out of the same stable as Zola and others. Yet I found that the added value of this novel came from the Portuguese flavor Eca de Queiros gave the story. The reader is presented with a society (or at least, part of one), and possibly a nation, that was struggling to come to terms with its past and present: how to reconcile wanting to be part of the European mainstream yet maintain its proud identity. Through the mouth of Ega, Carlos's friend, Eca de Queiros relates this dilemma - the frustration that Portugal copied other countries rather than doing anything original yet had a deep sense of its own history and worth (at one point, Ega bemoans that everything of worth in Portugal has to be imported or copied, at another point he advocates, somewhat provocatively, a Spanish takeover of the country in order to arouse Portuguese nationalism).
Recommended, therefore, for many reasons.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best books ever written
Comment: 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!
Rating: 3
Summary: Yes, well.
Comment: Always craving novelty, I was quite interested to read a novel by a guy I'd never heard of from a country about which I know nothing, literature-wise--let alone one which, according to the helpful editors and amazon reviewers, is an all-time classic, to boot. With Zola comparisons, to boot.
So all right, I read it. And now I find myself wondering if it wasn't...well, obscure for a reason. It isn't that The Maias is a bad novel, exactly, but it IS the least-compelling book I've read in a long time. Forget Zola; aside from a few moments of atmospheric vividness, and a nearly non-existent plot structure that could possibly be compared to Nana's, those don't really pan out. Actually, it's manifestly obvious that Eca's big influence was Flaubert--basically, A Sentimental Education, only in Lisbon. And, um, not nearly as good.
I think that the biggest problem is Eca's failure to create a particularly memorable cast of characters. Sure, Flaubert's characters are generally small, fairly trivial people, but they hold our interest nonetheless. Eca's characters, with a few exceptions, simply don't; the cast is large, but most of its members are colorless props without much more than a single personality trait apiece who sort of hover in the background to provide the necessary heads for the novel's numerous interminable set pieces. And the protagonist, Carlos da Maia, is emphatically no Frederic Moreau.
There are things that I liked about The Maias: the opening hundred or so pages, relating the family's history in brief up to Carlos's adulthood where the main narrative begins, engaged me fairly well (Carlos is a helluva lot more interesting as a child than an adult, actually); his great romance, once it begins, renewed my interest to an extent; and said romance's shattering climax (helpfully spoiled by both the back cover copy AND the introduction of this Penguin edition) is appropriately, well, shattering. The ending's also pretty good, if a bit heavy-handed--if you somehow had failed to notice it before, the influence of Flaubert's masterpiece should at least become apparent here. Still, these virtues aren't really enough to drown out the vices in my view; getting all the way through the book was a real act of willpower on my part.
It doesn't help either, of course, that the Penguin edition is so very lackluster. Given that Eca is an unfamiliar writer to most native English-speakers, and that nineteenth-century Portuguese history and culture are likewise generally mysterious, one would think that the editors would have made an extra effort to be helpful, but in this, alas, one would be wrong. The introduction feels very desultory and is almost wholly non-illuminating, and there are virtually no footnotes, and those that do exist (all of them in the second half, which strengthens my theory that the two strangely biography-free translators didn't really collaborate, but rather each translated half, and then they mashed the two together--there's also the way the text abruptly starts abbreviating 'Senhor' at about the halfway mark) seem almost random--there are quite a few references that simply left me clueless. The translation isn't so hot either; while it seems servicable in general, there are occasional word choices and turns of phrase that make you go "guh?," and, as parenthetically noted above, there are some odd inconsistencies. All in all, it seems that the people responsible for assembling this volume got as bored as I did.
I don't know--I certainly don't want to discourage the exploration of other cultures, but if this is really the best that nineteenth-century Portugal has to offer...well. If you absolutely MUST READ a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel, knock yourselves out, I suppose, but if all you're after is something from the last century in a language not traditionally associated with a great literary tradition, I humbly recommend Boleslaw Prus for your consideration.
Thank you for listening.
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Title: The Lusiads by Luis Vaz De Camoes, Landeg White, Luis Vaz de Camoies ISBN: 0192801511 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Illustrious House of Ramires (A Revived Modern Classic) by Eca De Queiros, Anne Stevens, Eca de Queiros, Jose Maria EA Queiros, Eca De Queiroz ISBN: 0811212645 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Crime of Father Amaro by Jose Maria Eca De Queiros, Margaret Jull Costa ISBN: 0811215326 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move by A. J. R. Russell-Wood ISBN: 0801859557 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture by Jose Saramago, Amanda Hopkinson, Nick Caistor ISBN: 0156007134 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 06 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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