Agony in Affluence, THE MAIAS by EÇA DE QUEIROZ

Friday, Nov. 26, 1965

THE MAIAS by Eça de Queiroz. 633 pages. St. Martin's Press. $7.95.

Jose Maria de Eça de Queiroz (1845-1900) presents a claim to fame that is also a patent of obscurity. He is the major novelist of a minor language: Portuguese. A scrawny chap with big buck teeth and a hook nose, Eça de Queiroz (pronounced Essa de Kay-rozh) spent most of his life as a Portuguese consul in London and Paris, fell under the spell of Flaubert and Zola, wrote a stack of realistic novels that appalled the provincial Portuguese and impressed some literate Parisians but missed fire in America. In 1962, however, a translation of O Crime do Padre Amaro presented him to U.S. readers as a satirist of force and finesse.

And now this excellent translation of Os Maias, a masterpiece of his maturity, demonstrates that Eça de Queiroz was an ironic realist surpassed in total achievement only by the greatest of the great 19th century novelists.

Last Hope. The Maias is a social chronicle on the grand scale, a 633-page epic that depicts the decline of the illustrious house of Maia, and with it the degeneration of the Portuguese aristocracy. The decline reaches the critical stage when Pedro da Maia shoots himself because his wife has run off with another man and taken her small daughter along. Fortunately for the Maias, Pedro's absconding spouse has left a son behind, and Pedro's aged father undertakes to regenerate the family by nurturing its last hope.

The strenuous life is prescribed for the boy, and little Carlos responds superbly. At 25, having completed his medical studies and a grand tour of Europe, he is magnificently equipped to preserve his family and to serve his country. With verve and apparent determination he opens a handsome consulting room, sets up a modern experimental laboratory, blocks out a much-needed history of medicine.

Wrong Thing. Lisbon, Carlos fancies, lies at his feet; perhaps—but Lisbon is snoring. Patients, assuming that a man of his means must either be a very expensive doctor or a very bad one, stay away in droves. His fine friends, however, arrive by the dozen to chatter about literature, politics, the latest scandal; to lure him off to a café, the opera, a dinner party, an assignation. Carlos resists, but not very vigorously. In a few months, he finds himself living the life of a Latin playboy and wondering a bit anxiously if anything serious will ever happen to him.

What happens is what usually happens to a man who sits around and waits for things to happen: the wrong thing. One day Carlos sees a woman on the street, and is instantly smitten with the sort of grand passion that is possible only to the passive. He makes her his mistress, and is about to make her his wife when he discovers that the lady is his long-lost sister. Here at last is the romantic disaster for which Carlos has been secretly hoping, the excuse that will justify his failure to stand up and fight like a man for the ideals he passionately professes but does not deeply feel. In a paroxysm of pusillanimity he abandons his career, his country, all hope of a meaningful existence. He runs away to Paris, and there squanders the best year of his life in sophisticated inanition.

TIME

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