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The Maias, by Eca de Queiros

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

"Margaret Jull Costa's new translation of the masterpiece of Eca de Queiros, The Maias, is vastly more readable that the other version now available in English. The Maias is one of the most impressive European novels of the nineteenth century, fully comparable to the most inspired novels of the great Russian, French, Italian and English masters of prose fiction. A family chronicle of intense historical insight and narrative power, The Maias reveals the decadence of Portugal in its long decline that was to culminate in the Salazar Fascist regime of the twentieth century. More than that, The Maias is a vision also of the general European malaise that eventually brought on the two World Wars and their aftermaths." --Harold Bloom

"The greatest book by Portugal's greatest novelist." --Jose Saramago, Nobel Laureate

"Eca de Queiros bears comparison with Balzac and Flaubert." --The London Sunday Times

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

"Eca ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century." --The London Observer

A huge, rich and enormously satisfying novel, The Maias, Eca de Queiros's famed masterpiece of 1888, is finally available in the English translation that this great book deserves.

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 Jose Saramago's Blindness), New Directions is proud to bring Eca de Queiros' brilliant prose to life for American readers for the first time.

One of the leading intellectuals of the "Generation of 1870," JOSE MARIA ECA DE QUEIROS (1845-1900) wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, and for most of his life also worked as a diplomat, in Havana, London, and Paris. Also from New Directions by Eca de Queiros: The Crime of Father Amaro, ISBN 978-0-8112-1532-6 (made into a 2002 hit movie starring Gael Garcia Bernal); The Illustrious House of Ramires, ISBN 978-0-8112-1264-5; The Yellow Sofa, ISBN 978-0-8112-1339-0. Pbk. (NDP1080)

Date of publication: July 2007