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The first literary biography in English of Eça de Queiroz, the Portuguese Dickens.
A compassionate tale of marriage, manners, and betrayal, from the Portuguese master José Maria Eça de Queirós, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with (in his own words) “no digressions, no rhetoric,” creating a book where “everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated.” The story, a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns a successful businessman who returns home to find his wife “on the yellow damask sofa, leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man.” The man is none other than his best friend and business partner. While struggling with the need to defend his honor, he fights a stronger inner desire for domestic tranquility and forgiveness. The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eça de Queirós in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy.
In this simple tale, the novel's hero is the talented heir to a notable family in Lisbon. He aspires to serve his fellow man in his chosen profession of medicine, in the arts, and in politics. But he enters a society affected by powerful international influences--French intellectual developments, English trading practices--that trouble and frustrate him. In the end he is reduced to a kind of spiritual helplessness and his good intentions are reduced to dilettantism. His passionate love affair begins to suffer a devastating constraint.
As so often with Eca de Queiros, the plot is simple; the fascination of the novel lies in the characters, the incidents and, above all, the warm humanity and mordant wit of this acute observer of the human condition.
In his will, Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) left a bequest in honor of his brother Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870) to establish and support a French literary salon, the Academie Goncourt, and later the famous Prix Goncourt, an award that to this day remains France's most significant literary prize. --- The Goncourt brothers, who co-authored a series of novels on social themes, were among the founders of literary "Naturalism" in France. Emile Zola would emerge as this movement's most important representative in his cycle of novels "Les Rougon- Macquart". --- Among the novels co-written by the Goncourt brothers, "Germinie Lacerteux" (1865) is especially noteworthy. The double-live of the novel's Parisian domestic servant, who is ground down and destroyed by the conditions she lives in, but who for decades keeps these conditions hidden from her employer, continues to captivate book-lovers in France and the rest of the world to this day.
Carlos, heir to a great fortune, becomes a doctor and drifts along spending time at the theater, reading, and having affairs, until he falls deeply in love but has to hide a terrible secret.
Centers on a priest's seduction of a young and innocent girl, Amelia--a candid indictment of moral and social decadence, of a corrupt society ministered to by a smug and hypocritical clergyman--a moving story of human passion and human fallibility.
Two friends were kidnapped on the road to Sintra by three masked men and taken to a mysterious house. In the house there is a corpse. The usual questions arise: who was he? How did he die? Was it a natural death or a murder? Who was the perpetrator or the instigator of the crime? The two friends are the two narrators - Eca de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigao - whose story was published in the form of letters to the editor recounting what happened to them."
Produced by Biblioteca Nacional Digital ( http://bnd.bn.pt ), Rita Farinha and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
"One night at the theatre, Vitor da Silva, a young law graduate, sees a strikingly beautiful woman: Genoveva de Molineux. She claims to have been born in Madeira and to have lived for many years in Paris. The truth about her past gradually begins to surface, as does the terrible secret that lies behind the overwhelming mutual attraction between her and Vitor"--Back cover.