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The Maias - Episodes of a Romantic Life - Book II: A New Translation
Afonso da Maia has spent a long life trying to be what Portugal should have cultivated, liberal, serious, a man of genuine civilization in a country that keeps failing to become one. He raises his grandson Carlos — his son Pedro's marriage has ended in abandonment and suicide, the abandoned daughter disappeared with her mother into an unknown future — with deliberate care, sends him to England, forms him as the Geração de 70's ideals would have formed a intelligent, cosmopolitan, equipped with everything that Portugal needs and that Portugal, in its current condition, has no adequate use for.
Carlos returns to Lisbon. He practices medicine without urgency, moves through the city's social world with the ease of a man for whom everything is available and nothing is urgent, and sustains his closest friendship with João da Ega — satirist, conversationalist, perpetual author of a great novel that does not yet exist, the most brilliant and the most unproductive man in a generation of brilliant and unproductive men. Then he meets Maria Eduarda.
Eça de Queiroz published The Maias in 1888, after years of composition, and it is his masterwork and the greatest novel in the Portuguese a social panorama of Lisbon in the 1870s rendered with Tolstoyan density and Flaubertian precision, and at its center a family tragedy of classical dimensions whose catastrophic revelation — that the woman Carlos loves is his sister, the daughter Pedro's wife took with her a generation earlier — is prepared from the novel's first pages with an architecture so exact that the revelation feels, when it arrives, simultaneously shocking and inevitable.
Afonso dies. Carlos leaves Portugal. Years later, he returns and meets Ega in Lisbon, and together they walk through the city and survey the landscape of what their lives have been. The novel ends with the two of them running after something through the streets — stopping — and laughing. The laughter and the desolation are indistinguishable, which is precisely what Eça intended, and precisely what the generation he was writing about had always done.
One of the great novels of European literature — vast, precise, funny, devastating, and written with the specific authority of a man who loved the world he was condemning and understood it completely.
Carlos returns to Lisbon. He practices medicine without urgency, moves through the city's social world with the ease of a man for whom everything is available and nothing is urgent, and sustains his closest friendship with João da Ega — satirist, conversationalist, perpetual author of a great novel that does not yet exist, the most brilliant and the most unproductive man in a generation of brilliant and unproductive men. Then he meets Maria Eduarda.
Eça de Queiroz published The Maias in 1888, after years of composition, and it is his masterwork and the greatest novel in the Portuguese a social panorama of Lisbon in the 1870s rendered with Tolstoyan density and Flaubertian precision, and at its center a family tragedy of classical dimensions whose catastrophic revelation — that the woman Carlos loves is his sister, the daughter Pedro's wife took with her a generation earlier — is prepared from the novel's first pages with an architecture so exact that the revelation feels, when it arrives, simultaneously shocking and inevitable.
Afonso dies. Carlos leaves Portugal. Years later, he returns and meets Ega in Lisbon, and together they walk through the city and survey the landscape of what their lives have been. The novel ends with the two of them running after something through the streets — stopping — and laughing. The laughter and the desolation are indistinguishable, which is precisely what Eça intended, and precisely what the generation he was writing about had always done.
One of the great novels of European literature — vast, precise, funny, devastating, and written with the specific authority of a man who loved the world he was condemning and understood it completely.
454 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 6, 2026
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