The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers
Eca de Queiroz Dedalus, 320pp, £9.99
ISBN 187398264X
Two monuments stand close together at the southern end of Lisbon's Bairro Alto: the statue of LuIs de Camoes, the assured surveyor of the praca that bears his name; and, a few steps down the Rua do Alecrim, that of Eca de Queiroz looking serenely over the naked figure of Truth. The proximity is significant: just as Camoes is regarded as the national poet, so Queiroz - or Eca, as the Portuguese call him - is considered the national novelist. Narrative pace, fluency and ruthless satire characterise his writing. The most frequent object of this satire is the decadence of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in late 19th-century Lisbon - with all its attendant misery and sacrifice. The writing is blunt and direct: life is dominated by sordid affairs, corruption and a convenient moral outrage. Queiroz's later writing, however, takes on a new dimension: the theme that dominates both The Maias (his most acclaimed novel) and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers is incest.
The dynamic of both novels derives from the inevitability of the incestuous relationship, the lovers drawn to the coils and springs of desire in absolute ignorance of their blood ties - a shocking reiteration of the catastrophe enshrined by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. While the latter presents only the fact of the unnatural crime, Queiroz describes all its allure and physicality. In The Maias, the protagonists are brother and sister; in The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, they are mother and son. There is a terrible beauty about the relationships, as desire moves to its fulfilment - the storm, seen from afar, that has to break.
The darkness of The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers does not, however, preclude wit and caricature. The protagonists are typical of Queiroz's work: the fat libertine who buys his pleasure; the English governess, a stick with more desires than Venus; the maid of a thousand lovers; the aspirant painter who changes his aesthetic more often than his socks; the Anglophile uncle, full of decency, understanding and beliefs cast in iron; the law graduate who aspires to the sentimental and the poetic, and whose masterpiece is finally published in a women's magazine; a high-class prostitute with the bearing of royalty. Lisbon society is a mosaic of vanity, self-delusion, prostitution and hypocrisy.
The pressing logic of the plots, the clarity and occasional lyricism of the prose, as well as the mastery of dialogue, make Queiroz a formidable author, so it is all the more surprising that translations of his books into English are so rare. Huge praise, then, to the publishers for their determination to make available major works that are otherwise neglected in Anglophone countries, and to the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, whose achievement is giving the impression that Queiroz might have written the English himself.
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