Both playful and profound... This is an Eden of contrasts. It is at once intimate and vast, sensuous and red in tooth and claw, with 'linting marble rocks blushing warm and pink', while oxen and deer lock horns 'with the dry crack of oaks felled by the wind'... all the contrasts, perhaps counterintuitively, form a fine, multi-layered whole. And we are in excellent hands with Margaret Jull Costa - a translator who has perhaps done more than anyone to help the literature of Europe's westernmost country find an international audience. Despite the gap of time, these pages read fluently, avoiding the Portuguese fondness for overlong sentences and inviting us, with wit and respect, to view Adam and Eve, and origin stories great and small, anew.--Franklin Nelson "The Spectator"
The narrator of this superb and archly satirical 1897 novella by Eça de Queirós (The Illustrious House of Ramires) casts the biblical Paradise as a terrifying wilderness. In the author's funhouse version of Genesis, the orangutans may be happier than man, despite the "many gifts that God gave us." This is sublime.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
A writer of mesmerizing literary power. We should be grateful for such blessings.--Michael Dirda "Washington Book Post World"
Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century.-- "The London Observer"
His excellent prose glides through real experience and private dream in a manner that is leading on toward the achievements of Proust.--V. S. Pritchett
Portugal's greatest novelist.--José Saramago