- The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers
- by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
- Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
- Dedalus £9.99
Vítor loves Genoveva, professional mistress to another man, and although each is willing to give up everything for the other, it seems circumstance may keep them apart. A satirical portrait of 19th-century Lisbon society, this novel is cutting without being cruel. Readers will enjoy it for its tone and the strong cast of well-observed secondary characters more than for the saccharine love story, which suffers the melodramatic tendencies of its time (Vítor, especially, is a pill). If the book was never published during the author's life it is perhaps because the tragedy of the title is somewhat asthmatic, wheezing in late and immediately expiring, but even as a literary curiosity, The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers is a fascinating visit to a period with a very different approach to morality, both more structured in its minutiae and more chaotic in its general form. The translation is extremely readable, neither annoyingly modern nor embarrassingly archaic, although readers are strongly advised to skip the translator's introduction, which gives away the story.
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