To the Capital
This is the seventh volume in the Carcanet's Eca de Queiros programme which includes "The Maias, Cousin Basilio", "The Illustrious House of Ramires", "The City and the Mountains", "The Sin of Father Amaro", "The Yellow Sofa & Three Portraits".
Artur Corvelo inherits a legacy, quits his provincial home town and sets out for the capital. Armed hopefully with some poems and a heroic play, he seeks literary renown and entry into fashionable intellectual and social circles. Disillusion follows and he returns to his origins, his play unperformed, poorer certainly, wiser perhaps. 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. "To the Capital", posthumously published in Lisbon has not been previously available in English. It is here translated by John Vetch, whose version of "The Yellow Sofa" attracted much favourable attention when it was published in 1993. The text used takes account of the scholarly "definitive" edition of Eca's work recently published in Lisbon.
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.
