The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The City and the Mountains, by José Maria de Eça de Queirós
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

Trans. and afterword Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2008. 282 pp. Paper: $15.95.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) is revered as the greatest Portuguese novelist, a peer of Balzac, Dickens, and Galdós, but it is Joris-Karl Huysmans who comes to mind during the first half of The City and the Mountains. Like Des Esseintes, the paragon of Decadence who constructs an entirely artificial existence for himself in Huysmans’s 1884 novel A rebours, Jacinto, the wealthy young aristocrat who dominates Eça’s final novel, which was written in 1895 but published posthumously in 1901, is repulsed by the natural world. He equips his mansion at No. 202 Champs-Elysées with all the devices that his inventive century and his prophetic novelist, anticipating our own controlled environments, could conceive—not only electricity, air conditioning, telephone, and teletype, but also machines that transmit theatrical performances, address his envelopes, and button his underwear. Convinced that “we must surround ourselves with the maximum possible amount of Civilization in order to enjoy to the maximum the joy of being alive,” Jacinto makes himself into the most urbane denizen of the most sophisticated of cities, Paris. He becomes a connoisseur of art, philosophy, gastronomy, courtesanship, and gossip, but his dabbling produces a severe case of the malady of the century: ennui. A cure comes with Jacinto’s visit to his vast ancestral estate in the mountains of Portugal. The magnificent landscape and the simple pleasures of beans and rice induce ecstasy, and he extends his stay, using his time and wealth to assist the region’s impoverished peasants. Zé Fernandes, Jacinto’s countryman and best friend, narrates, and the reader will be almost as charmed as Zé is by the rusticating grandee he calls “my Prince.” Margaret Jull Costa’s translation from Portuguese, the first since South African poet Roy Campbell’s 1955 version, moves between scathing satire of fashionable, privileged indolence, and endearing pastoral fantasy.