Wow! eBook
The City and the Mountains New Edition
Author(s): Eca De Queiros (Author), Roy Campbell (Translator)
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication Date: 31 Aug. 1993
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1857541022
- ISBN-13: 9781857541021
Book Description
By the time Eça wrote The City and the Mountains he was consul in Paris.
Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications.
Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he redsicovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life. However, the mature Eça never à thèse or without subtlety; the ironic narrator, Zé Fernandes, though finally repelled in Paris by an ‘advanced’ society driven by the ‘breathless occupation of wanting’, insinuates doubts about the perfeection Jacinto finds in a return to the pastoral. This delightful novel, thogh written at the fin-de-siècle, belongs to our time in its wry and telling interest in simpler life-styles.
Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications.
Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he redsicovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life. However, the mature Eça never à thèse or without subtlety; the ironic narrator, Zé Fernandes, though finally repelled in Paris by an ‘advanced’ society driven by the ‘breathless occupation of wanting’, insinuates doubts about the perfeection Jacinto finds in a return to the pastoral. This delightful novel, thogh written at the fin-de-siècle, belongs to our time in its wry and telling interest in simpler life-styles.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Eca de Queiros was born in 1845 at Povoa de Varzim in northern Portugal, the son of a magistrate. After studying law, he travelled widely and entered the diplomatic service. Married, and with four children, Eca was known as a genial host, a raconteur, wit, dandy, aesthete and bon viveur. He served as consul in Havana, Bristol and Paris, where he died in 1900. Eca’s travel articles, essays and short stories first brought him to the notice of the Portuguese literary establishment. His early novels, The Crime of Father Amaro (1876) and Cousin Bazilio (1878), won him recognition as a writer of European stature. While Eca’s most significant literary influence was the French naturalist tradition of Flaubert, Balzac and Zola, his novels have their own distinctive voice: urbane, exact, amused and ironic. Eca’s exposure of the greed, pretensions and hypocrisies of his society is tempered by a warm sympathy for human frailty and a poignant sense of the fragility of happiness. His enjoyment of everyday life and his sense of the unpredictability of individual destiny give his novels an enduring immediacy.
Roy Campbell was a South African poet. He was considered by many poets – including T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas – to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First and Second World Wars. Campbell’s attacks upon the Marxism and Freudianism, and support for causes such as Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, made him a polarizing figure.
