The Maias

The Maias is the longest and most ambitious of Eça de Queiroz's eleven novels. Originally intended for serialization in a Lisbon newspaper but held over in favour of a shorter work, the book, which was finally published in 1888, offers both an extended commentary on the follies and aspirations of late nineteenth-century Portuguese society together with a sensational, but always realistic, account of a doomed love affair. Its hero Carlos de Maia has an ambivalent charm, based as much on his underlying failures of impulse as on his intelligence and personal graces. When he finally seizes the initiative and embarks on his pursuit of Maria Eduarda, first beheld, in all her lambent sophistication, stepping from a carriage outside her hotel, his obsession leads to the tragic unveiling of a long-suppressed secret.
Its details are disclosed to the lovers separately by the writer Joao da Ega, Carlos' alter ego, sometimes a Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote and surely the book's most engaging character. He belongs to that race of dreamers and fantasists interesting to Eça because they seemed to embody Portugal's own capacity for self-delusion and its retreat into nostalgic versions of the national past. Like Carlos himself, in his handsomely fitted doctor's consulting room which remains almost entirely unvisited by prospective patients, Joao never realizes his potential, but in the flawed humanity of both men the novel discovers a redemptive quality.
Eça is the master of narrative finale, usually accomplished through dialogue linked to skilfully deployed symbolism. The last scene of The Maias, in which Carlos and Joao, having agreed on the ultimate futility of effort in their lives, suddenly race to catch a tram, offers a fine flourish of comic irony. Margaret Jull Costa's new English version expertly captures the novelist's refined amalgam of the acerbic satirist and the compassionate observer.