The Yellow Sofa (New Directions)

The blurb on the book's cover gives a good summary so I’ll start with that as the first paragraph:Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (1843-1900), the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with, as he said, "no digressions, no rhetoric," where "everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated." The story, a terse and 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 and business partner. Godofredo struggles with the public need to defend his honor, and a stronger inner desire for forgiveness and domestic tranquility.Godofredo sends his wife home to her father. The old man is reluctant to accept her back until he negotiates a “stipend” for her support. The main character proposed a duel with his offending business partner. Both men in the proposed duel round up “seconds” and the story becomes a farce as we watch Godofredo get antsy as the friends deliberately talk about having a doctor on standby to tend to wounds and as they advise him to get his will in order. The men try to convince the main character that even though he caught her snuggling up in her negligee this was a ‘flirtation,’ not an ‘affair.’I like Eca’s irony and humor. One of his own friends who will act as second in the proposed duel is himself worried about repercussions from a husband finding out about his own on-going affair with a married woman. Without his wife present to run the household, Godofredo can’t control his maid and cook; he gets crappy meals, the house becomes a pigsty, and the maids start bringing men into the apartment when he’s not there.A good story, a novella (112 pages) so a quick read. Eca’s son in an introduction explains that the story was found among Eca’s papers after his death and no one knows when it was written. It may have been part of a project the author had in mind to write 100 novellas about life in Portugal featuring people in different regions, occupations and social classes. One hundred novellas -- now that’s ambition! Most likely it was written around 1880.

No less than José Saramago said that Eça de Queirós is Portugal's greatest novelist. As a writer of realist fiction, Eça has been placed in the same rank as Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy. This is the second novel of Eça's that I have read. ("The City and the Mountain" was the first.) And, yes, he is a great writer. And, yes, he is a realist. But there is a tongue-in-cheek, playful quality to Eça's writing, at least as represented by the two novels that I now have read. Eça gently mocks the pretensions of humans. His view of life is essentially comedic, not tragic.In THE YELLOW SOFA, respectable Lisbon businessman Godofredo da Conceiçao Alves (I don't know Portuguese, but a name like that surely would not be given to a tragic hero) returns to the office to be told by the clerk that his business partner and close friend Senhor Machado left to attend the theater. Alves goes about his work until he suddenly realizes that it is his fourth wedding anniversary. He quickly leaves to make arrangements for a special dinner and on his way home he buys his wife Lulu a bracelet -- a golden serpent with two rubies for eyes, biting its own tail, symbolizing lasting continuity. When he gets home, he silently proceeds to Lulu's boudoir to surprise her with his early arrival and the gewgaw, he draws the curtain, and there, on a yellow damask sofa, is Lulu in a white negligee gazing languorously at a man whose arm is around her waist . . . and the man is Machado.Alves's life is turned akilter. His rage knows no bounds. Lulu clearly cannot live in his house any longer. He summons her father to collect his daughter. His father-in-law, however, claims that he cannot afford to take her back; furthermore, Alves, gentleman that he is, surely would not throw her out on the streets. It appears that the only option is for Alves to pay the father-in-law a monthly stipend to take back Lulu, plus an extra sum for the next few months so that the father-in-law can spirit her away from Lisbon to a seaside resort to minimize the potential for nasty gossip. As for Machado, well there must be a duel. But what kind of duel? "A duel with swords, two shirt-sleeved business men aiming clumsy and futile thrusts at each other until one was wounded in the arm -- that seemed to him ridiculous; nor was it fitting that they should exchange a couple of pistol shots, miss each other, and then each of them, flanked by seconds, turn and climb ceremoniously into hired carriages." And so goes the novel, posing one quandary after another, with Alves continually having to reconcile his impulses to the social world around him.To tell the truth, THE YELLOW SOFA is something of a literary bonbon. It certainly is not on the order of "Madame Bovary", or "Lost Illusions", or "Anna Karenina". But its 112 pages make good fare for an evening's reading.

I was completely unaware of Eca De Queiros prior to reading this book. He is an excellent writer - although this is a slim volume it successfully moves it characters through a number of changes and emotions as a marriage unravels in infidelity. The portrayal of the emotions, their "wallop", will remain with you long after you've finished the novel and the plot line is forgotten - in this sense, those who read for the quality of the writing may enjoy this book more than those who read for action and plot.