19th Century
A01=Eca De Queiros
Author_Eca De Queiros
Category=FBC
Category=FJH
Category=FRH
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Portuguese
Product details
- ISBN 9781857546842
- Weight: 466g
- Dimensions: 134 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 27 Feb 2003
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The explosive and highly controversial 2002 film of The Crime of Father Amaro (El crimen del Padre Amaro) is set in Mexico, in a material and religious culture of this century not unlike the provincial Portugal where, as a young man, Eça de Queiros was despatched to train for the consular service. The Crime of Father Amaro is set in Leiria, a provincial cathedral city, in which the hypocrisies of churchmen were not far to seek. Father Amaro, a young man like Eça himself, with a priestly rather than a diplomatic vocation, falls into a relationship with a woman, and their tragic story unfolds with a harsh relentlessness. The situation of women, tightly swaddled in conformities yet fevered in their illusions of romance, much troubled the young author in this and later books.
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.
