The Yellow Sofa Jos Maria Ea De Queirs John Vetch Translation by José Maria Eça De Queirós, John Vetch (translation) 9780811225847, 0811225844 instant download after payment.

"His excellent prose glides through real experience & private dream in a manner that is leading on toward the achievements of Proust." —V.S. Pritchett

A compassionate tale of marriage, manners, & betrayal, from the Portuguese master

José Maria Eça de Queirós, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with, as he said, “no digressions, no rhetoric,” where “everything is interesting & dramatic & quickly narrated.” The story, a terse & seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns Godofredo Alves, a successful, buoyant businessman who returns home to find his wife “on the yellow damask sofa… leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man…” 

The man is none other than Machado, his best friend & business partner. Godofredo struggles with the public need to defend his honor, & a stronger inner desire for forgiveness & domestic tranquillity. The Babel Guide to Portuguese Fiction notes, “The genius of this book is how Eça captures all the emotional fluctuations… & with such accuracy. The result is an enjoyable humorous novella that is simultaneously breathtakingly ironic.” The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eça de Queirós in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac & Tolstoy.

One of the leading intellectuals of the "Generation of 1870," José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, & for most of his life also worked as a diplomat, in Havana, London, & Paris.

John Vetch has translated Eça de Queirós’s The Yellow Sofa & To the Capital.