EÇA DE QUEIROZ, JOSÉ MARIA DE

EÇA DE QUEIROZ, JOSÉ MARIA de. – Portuguese novelist, born in Povoa de Varzim on 25 November 1845, died at Torigi on 16 August 1900. A keen observer, whose intellectual experience was greatly enriched by a long sojourn in foreign countries, and a subtle humorist, he provided an example of a new richness of language, a flexibility of style, and a creative power hitherto unknown in Portugal.

From an initial modernist attitude (the Prosas barbaras date from 1875), he enthusiastically converted to

a negating, pessimistic realism, only to free himself from it later, when aspirations of reform and reconstruction directed his concerns toward broader problems: thus, in Crime do Padre Amaro (1875), his first success, he studied the problem of religious celibacy in the light of observation and experience, but in Primo Barillo (1878), and even more so in Maias (1888), his interest extended to the life of the capital, its morality and its religion, while his acuteness of observation and sometimes intense emotion were not diminished by caricatural exaggeration. The autobiographical motif of the slightly later Memorias de um atomo, rendered bitter by a sense of the vanity of life, is accentuated in Correspondencia de Fadrique Mendes (1889), the story of an aesthete sensitive to new ideas but incapable of putting them into practice.

Il Mandarino (1880) presents, in an exotic setting, an amusing satire of Portuguese bureaucracy, while La Relíqua, a caricature of hypocritical bigotry, provides the occasion for a superb evocation of the Passion and the Holy Places. In a final phase, particularly in the novels A ilustre casa de Ramires and A cidade e a serra (The City and the Mountains), this position appears to have been overcome: the horizon broadens and brightens with a serene optimism; freed from the canons of realistic art, the writer no longer dwells on the minute notation of details, but creates scenes of ideal beauty around a real theme: I Contos mark his final peak. Among the minor works, the story A catastrofe assumes particular significance as an exaltation of that experience of suffering which alone is capable of awakening the finest energies of a people as well as of an individual.