Greatest Portuguese writer ever!
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Eca de Queiroz is definitely the best writer Portugal has ever had. Not only the stories are amazingly well written, intelligent and funny but he also manages to grab our attention from the first to the last page in a way that no one else can. Absolutely amazing.
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A favourite
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I had to read this book for secondary school, but by that time I had already read it twice as my sisters were older! At the time I loved the "realness" and the beautiful writing of Eca de Queiros. The descriptions in the book are so vivid that I lost myself in it countless times. Being portuguese it is the novel that reflects the sentiment of the diletant so ingrained in the culture. It has so much whithin it's pages, my favourite bits are: life as a young person, the perspectives of all the characters, and they are markedly different from each other. I adore Afonso the grandfather. He is simply a good man with great strenght. My favourite has to be Ega he is devilish but loyal, taking as much advantage of the portuguese way of life as possible only to sucomb to superficiality of the "in" crowd of the time. Most of what is written still feels very recent and true. It is very much like Middlemarch (G.Elliot) in the way it depicts the essence of a country which still reaches out to everyone. Very biased i'm afraid but this is certainly one of the best books I've read, and read, and read... (LOST COUNT ACTUALLY) A MUST
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An unknown classic, worth sticking with
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Eca de Queiros is like Dickens: a good storyteller who also draws attention to the social evils of his day. But this novel is also like "Middlemarch": there are quite a lot of characters and it takes a few chapters to introduce them all and a bit longer for the reader to remember them all! The "hero" is an idler, a dreamer, a snob, a womaniser, a cad and a coward. But Eca de Queiros' style is to keep firmly in the background: he makes no moral comment whatsoever. In the end it seems normal that Carlos da Maia and his friend Ega only think of pursuing married women. Another feature is that whole scenes will be described in quite some detail (a dinner party, a trip into the country, a day at the races, a charity concert, a newspaper office) each like a window on to a different aspect of Lisbon society. It could become like a series of short stories but the narrative pulls these scenes together, while they give the canvas of the novel great breadth. Chapters 4-6 are probably the toughest going and each chapter is thirty pages long or so: you end up having to put the book down in mid-chapter. My advice would be: stick with it until you have completed chapter 7. This is where the novel takes off, with one married woman courting the hero, while his infatuation begins with another married woman. The Portuguese speaking world rank Eca de Queiros with Dickens or Balzac. This is undoubtedly true: this author should be more widely known!
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An excellent book by the most gifted Portuguese author.
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Os Maias, by Eca de Queiros, is the intense saga of the Maias, a very wealthy family, in a decadent period of portuguese history and through several generations. The novel focuses, through this setting, on the inevitability of fate; it also uses the family to send a tough criticism to society at the time of writing and contains in it a warning and a lesson for us today. Eca de Queiros has artfully strung together the various social issues that pervaded (and pervade) society, not least of which is the futile and decadent lifestyle led by the extremely rich, and how empty it all turns out to be in the end. This book is definitely worth reading, but requires some effort, particularly for those (like me) with a short attention span. Well worth it in the end, though, particularly if you are able to read it in the original language.
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