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Pages: 512

Queiroz, Eça: Cousin Bazilio

EUR 18,00

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Cousin Bazilio is a tale of sexual folly and hypocrisy and vividly depicts bourgeois life in the nineteenth-century Lisbon. Eça gives us a whole gallery of characters from Bazilio, the suave villain to Jorge, the smugly uxorious husband, from Luiza, the bored, empty-headed wife to Juliana, the plain, ailing maidservant desperate, by whatever means, to grab life’s little luxuries, from Leopoldina, nicknamed “the Ever-Open Door”, to Joana the cook and her affair with the tubercular carpenter who lives opposite, and the voluminous Dona Felicidade who nurses an entirely unrequited passion for the unbearably pompous Acácio, who lives in concubinage with his much younger housekeeper with his much younger housekeeper, who is also having an affair…

Eça de Queiroz is Portugal’s greatest nineteenth-century writer. This, his second novel, was published in 1878 to great acclaim and great scandal. What scandalised then was the book’s frank description of sex and sexual desire, what still grips the reader now is the author’s acute portrayal of the constraints imposed on both men and women, but especially women, and, as ever with Eça, his unerring sense of irony.

This product was added to our catalog on Thursday 07 September, 2006.

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