New PDF release: The Maias

By José Maria de Eça de Queirós

ISBN-10: 0811216497

ISBN-13: 9780811216494

Set in Lisbon on the shut of the 19th century, The Maias is either a coming-of-age novel and a passionate romance.
Our hero Carlos Maia, inheritor to at least one of the best fortunes in Portugal, is wealthy, good-looking, beneficiant and clever: he capability to do anything for his nation, whatever necessary, whatever that might make his liked grandfather proud. despite the fact that, Carlos is additionally somewhat a dilettante. He drifts alongside, turning into a physician and pottering approximately in his laboratory, yet spends a growing number of time driving his wonderful horses or traveling the theater, having affairs or studying novels. His ally and leader associate in crime, Ega, is also engaged in an extended summertime of witticisms and delight. Carlos despite the fact that is determined on a lifeless reckoning path with fate—with the affection of his existence and with a poor, bad secret...

Newly translated by way of the acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa (translator of José Saramago's Blindness), New instructions is proud to deliver Eça de Queirós' superb prose to existence for American readers for the 1st time.

If Eca de Queiros have been English, Russian, or French he will be global recognized and "The Maias" will be universally well-known as one of many maximum novels ever written. It's a stinging photograph of Portugal within the 1870s, its still-wealthy aristocracy alternating among vapid amorous affairs and wittily despairing conversations concerning the impossibility of being something or an individual in any such hopeless state. It's an affectionate yet sincere portrait of 2 buddies, either one of them talented and either one of them with no the seriousness to stay as much as their presents, and a portrait of Lisbon, a as soon as nice imperial capital through then in terminal decline. It's an extreme and passionate love tale, advised with a frankness approximately actual love that breaks each stereotype there's approximately 19th century prudery. In six hundred pages it provides us an entire international and a crowd of memorable humans, them all visible with either unsparing readability and nice love. but for all of its ardour and unhappiness the publication is written with a mild contact; a few of the early chapters are excessive comedy, and there should be few masterpieces of fiction which are as stress-free to learn. this can't be steered hugely sufficient, and Margaret Jull Costa's outstanding translation, notwithstanding a bit heavy at the exclamation issues, has been most well-liked through the entire reviewers to the interpretation to be had from Penguin. Its analyzing has been, for a very long time, obligatory for eleventh 12 months scholars in Portugal. (!)