Resumen
Resumen de El primo Basilio
Para quién es
For readers who love psychological novels, social satire and stories about marriage and class, or who enjoy Flaubert and Zola.
De qué trata este libro
Cousin Bazilio is a novel by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós, published in 1878. It is set in Lisbon in the years just before, among clerks, engineers, priests, gossips and servants. Eça wrote it as a work of realism. He wanted to show a middle-class marriage as it really was, with its habits, its money worries and its small lies, and to judge the society around it.
The story begins with a quiet wife, a husband who loves her, and a house that runs like clockwork. Then the husband leaves on business, and an old suitor comes back from Paris. From that small change, a chain of choices unfolds, and each choice has a price. The book was widely read in Portugal and was also attacked, because it said things about marriage and hypocrisy that many readers did not want said.
What you get here is the shape of the whole book. You will meet its people, follow the main turns of the plot, and see what Eça was aiming at and how he builds it. Let us begin with the house in Lisbon where Luísa lives, and with the dull comfort that she finds so hard to bear.
En este resumen
- 1A comfortable marriage that feels like a cageFree
- 2The circle of friends and the great bore
- 3Jorge leaves and Basílio comes back
- 4A secret house called Paradise
- 5The servant who sees everything
- 6Letters that become a weapon
- 7Romantic dreams against hard reality
- 8A satire of a respectable society
- 9How Eça builds his realist novel
Idea clave 1 de 9
A comfortable marriage that feels like a cage
The story opens with Luísa, a young Lisbon wife, and her husband Jorge. Jorge is an engineer who works for the government on mines and public works. He is kind, hardworking and fond of her. They have a pleasant house, a cook and a maid, and a steady round of evenings with friends.
Luísa should be content, and in a way she is. But she is idle, and she is bored. She spends her days sewing, reading and waiting for the post. Her mind is full of romantic novels, in which love is a grand fire and women are swept into adventures. Her real life, with its tea, its dinners and its quiet husband, looks very small beside those pages.
Eça is careful to show that Luísa is not wicked. She is soft, vain and easily led, and she has never been asked to think hard about anything. She likes to be admired. She likes pretty clothes and the feeling of being someone in a story. Those traits are not crimes, but the novel will show how easily they can be used against her.
Jorge, for his part, is a good man who does not see what is in front of him. He trusts his wife completely. He believes that a household is safe when it is orderly, and he sees no reason to ask what goes on in her head. His blindness is not cruelty. It is the ordinary blindness of a busy man who thinks love can be left to look after itself.
This is the setting from which everything grows. The marriage is not broken, and nobody is mistreated. That is the point. Eça asks how a respectable woman in a respectable house can drift toward ruin without any one big decision, and he begins by showing us how ordinary the house is.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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