Illustrious House of Ramires     by Eça de Queirós, Translated by Ann Stevens Original title: A Illustre Casa de Ramires Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 1994 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.83 x 7.91 x 5.22 ISBN: 0811212645 List Price: $14.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $14.95 Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £7.95 Not available for ordering Published by Ohio UP Pub. Date: 1968 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover List Price: £14.95 Not available for ordering

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Like his French contemporary Huysmans, Eça de Queiros started his writing career as a disciple of Zola but came of age as a satirist rather than a realist. His protagonist in The Illustrious House of Ramires, Gonçalo Ramires or ‘The Nobleman of the Tower’, is a decadent aristocrat who entertains whimsical fantasies of future success as novelist and politician. Where Huysmans used the aimless Des Esseintes to explore a sterile aesthetic hell, Eça sets up in Ramires an allegory of Portugal itself. While Portugal plans to sell off its colonies, Ramires is forced to rent out his ancestral lands and as Republican rumblings threaten from Italy and Spain, Ramires, who sees the fatherland as ‘a beautiful estate’ governed by ‘those who receive and rule’, is disturbed by the insubordination of a local commoner.

In his well-stocked library, Ramires attempts to write a novel based on the exploits of his predecessors, vamping up his source material with heroic detail in the same way as an under confident Portugal was piecing together its own history in the form of a Romantic epic.

As the narrative jumps between Ramires’ life in a late nineteenth-century province and the Golden Age of his work-in-progress, the latter reproduces, in the form of a Shakespearean subplot, the particulars of Ramires’ situation in symbolic form. Ramires’ ancestor Tructesindo finds his castle assailed by Baião ‘The Bastard,’ who, holding his son to ransom, demands the hand of Tructesindo’s daughter. Similarly, Ramires finds himself importuned by the Civil Governor, a heartless womaniser, who offers him a future in politics in return for entry into his family circle, where he intends to seduce his sister. This two-tier system generates the novel’s driving irony, playing off Tructesindo’s heroic integrity against Ramires’ cowardice and willingness to compromise. As critics have pointed out, Ramires, in his obsession with a largely imaginary past, is a Don Quixote. But whereas Don Quixote, like a naive reader, interprets his chivalric fables literally, believing himself to be a knight—errant, Ramires understands all too well his own pathetic nature. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge he is haunted in his sleep by the ghosts of Ramireses past; the fados sung by his guitar-playing sidekick Videirinha to celebrate his family name, mock and torment him. In desperation, he sees a vision of his ancient tower ‘split apart, revealing an unexpected pile of rubbish and dirty skirts.’

Things pick up for Ramires when, almost inadvertently, he attacks the disrespectful ruffian whose constant insults provide one of the novel’s leitmotifs. Through a chain of Chinese whispers the episode is elaborated and exaggerated throughout the region until it is eventually reported in the Lisbon newspapers in a form no less heroic than Ramires’ own accounts of Tructesindo’s adventures. Swept into office on a wave of popularity, Ramires feels purified but also somewhat hollow, the novel thereby ending ambiguously, its satire scathing but not vindictive, its general tone more affectionate than subversive.

‘In the broad, lofty room where the broad, pallid rays of moonlight...“Broad, broad”! And the pallid rays, the eternal “pallid rays”! And this cursed castle was so complicated, too! And Don Tructesindo, whom I just can’t see clearly, and so ancient! Horrible, the whole lot! He knocked aside his leather chair, bit into his cigar angrily and marched out of the library, slamming the door behind him, thoroughly bored with his work, with that complicated and confused Manor of Santa Ireneia, and with his ancestors — huge iron-clad men with ringing voices who remained as elusive as wisps of smoke.’