The City & the Mountains     by Eça de Queirós, Translated by Roy Campbell Original title: As Cidade e as Serras Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Ohio UP, Athens, Ohio Pub. Date: 1967 Pub. Place: usa Format: Hardcover, 216 pages Not available for ordering Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1994 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 218 pages List Price: £14.95 Not available for ordering Published by Dufour, Philadelphia Pub. Date: 1962 Pub. Place: usa Format: Hardcover, 216 pages Not available for ordering

The City & the Mountains is a later and less-regarded work by Portugal’s master novelist, Eça de Queirós (1843-1900). However this tale of a (very) rich young man from rural Portugal who emigrates to Paris ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ as Walter Benjamin called it, is today suddenly very relevant and far-seeing.

Eça describes a life-style frighteningly like that lived by many in today’s big cities. His aristocratic hero becomes infatuated with a kind of trendy gadget-filled consumerism. His luxurious villa on the Champs-Elysées is loaded with telephones, —ticker-tapes, music and listening tubes connected to the Paris Opera or the Comédie Française. He has all the principal newspapers from around the world delivered every day and has every possible kind of book acquirable. In effect he’s on the Nineteenth Century Internet.

He cultivates exclusively ‘artificial’, highly elaborated pleasures and can’t bear to step outside the centre of Paris. His friends are all sophistication, guile and free-loading. He is in the Heart of Darkness and the City of Light simultaneously. He is blessed and damned as is anyone living in a high-tech world. To round out his point Eça provides a moral crisis for his protagonist which transports him back to the ‘good life’ in rural Portugal where this ex-urban sophisticate takes up a deeply unconvincing interest in the welfare of cows and peasants.

An astonishingly prescient and haunting book, which is well worth dragging out of its obscurity. The current edition was translated by the noted South African poet Roy Campbell.

‘Almost immediately she reappeared: and Madame Oriol....seated herself at the table, where Jacinto found Maltese tangerines for her, frozen chestnuts, and a biscuit soaked in Tokay.

She refused them with her hands kept in her muff. She was neither tall, nor strong, but every fold of her dress, or curve of her cloak, fell and rippled harmoniously, with perfections covering perfections. Under her close veil you could scarcely perceive the whiteness of her powdered skin or the darkness of her large eyes. What with those black silks and velvets and a little, hot reddish-gold hair, strongly twisted, which showed over the black furs on her nape, she gave forth a sensation of smoothness and fineness everywhere. Persistently I considered her as a flower of ‘Civilisation’ — and I thought of the centuries of toil, refinement and culture that were required to produce the soil from which such a flower could bud, and then bloom fully, as now, in full perfume, even more beautiful for being a flower of conscious cultivation and the hot house, and for having something in her petals that seemed about to fade and wither.’ p39