Maias (07 Edition)

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.

"'A veteran translator of Saramago and Pessoa, Jull Costa delivers Quiers's 1888 masterpiece in a beautiful English version that will become the standard. Rich scion Carlos de Maia — like his best friend, writer Joo 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. Quiers 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 — Galds, Clarn and Quiers — remains a puzzle. This novel stands with the great achievements of fiction. (July)' Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)"

Set in Lisbon at the close of the nineteenth century, The Maias is both a coming-of-age novel and a passionate romance.

Set in Lisbon at the close of the 19th century, this work is both a coming-of-age novel and a passionate romance. Newly translated by the acclaimed translator Costa, Eca de Queiross brilliant prose is brought to life for American readers for the first time.

One of the leading intellectuals of the "Generation of 1870," José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, and for most of his life also worked as a diplomat, in Havana, London, and Paris.Margaret Jull Costa won both the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the 2008 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Eca de Queiros's The Maias. She is also the translator of the work of Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes, and Javier Marías.