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Eça de Queirós's novel is a hymn to country life: The City and The Mountains satirizes the emptiness of city life and of modernity itself. Wonderfully funny, it bubbles with joie de vivre.
If a literary heaven exists, José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) might well be the patron saint of rakes. His bibliography sports a hardy gallery of idlers, seducers, and self-seekers who emerge relatively undiminished after getting rumpled up by adversity. In the pages of his books lurk men who outdistance the furies that collect behind calamities like, to list but a few examples: banishing one's sired newborn to a house of infanticide (The Crime of Father Amaro); bedding one's sister -- unknowingly then knowingly (The Maias); and trading away one's sister's virtue for the sake of political advantage (The Illustrious House of Ramires). Yet while the protagonists in these books seem to have a get-out-of-jail pass that Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Zola's Nana would've clung to, Eça de Queirós is nonetheless interested in censuring the failings of society, though without necessarily tying his characters' misbehaviors to ineluctable damnation.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Charles Angle
reviewed The City and the Mountains on November 03, 2013 The City and the Mountains
It was thanks to Henry's excellent review on this book that I recently purchased it. It was the "Library with the 30,000 books" and all of "the gadgets" that Jacinto had, that enticed me.
I was so taken with this book that I made notes galore and started typing the review. There were so many excellent quotations that stayed in my mind. Consequently, after typing several pages as I was "in full flight", I decided to cut it down considerably and so this is the result. I believe, and hope, it gets the excellence of the book across and that's the main thing.
All I need to say about this incredible book is that it is now sitting on my top-favourites' shelf on goodreads and my paperback is shortly going to be exchanged with the hardback that I have ordered today from Abe Books in France.
The story is simple:
"Jacinto, an absentee nobleman from Portugal, revels in joyous extremes in the latest of French sophistications in Paris. Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he rediscovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life, but there are doubts about this perfections..."
This book has everything that I, as a reader, want: humour, satire, it's philosophical, metaphysical, religious, has excellent prose, the splendour of Paris in the nineteenth century and the tranquillity of the country in Portugal. The writing style is exquisite.
The incident with the family bones in the local chapel in Portugal is one of the many things that spring to mind as one of the incredible incidents in this book.
The writing style is exquisite and well, it's the icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned with all of the books that I've been introduced to through Goodreads this year.
I'm now looking for a second book by this incredible author.
Amazing...What an imagination!
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