COUSIN BAZILIO (Dedalus European Classics)

Cousin Bazilio is a tale of sexual folly and hyprocrisy and vividly depicts bourgeois life in nineteenth-century Lisbon. Eca gives us a whole gallery of characters from Bazilio, the suave villain to Jorge, the smugly uxorious husband, from Luiza, the bored, empty-headed wife to Juliana, the plain, ailing maidservant desperate, by whatever means, to grab some of life's little luxuries, from Leopoldina, nicknamed 'the Ever-Open Door', to Joana the cook and her affair with the tubercular carpenter who lives opposite, and the voluminous Dona Felicidade who nurses an entirely unrequited passion for the unbearably pompous Acacio, who lives in concubinage with his much younger housekeeper, who is also having an affair.