The Yellow Sofa

Jose Maria Eca de Queiros, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with (in his own words) no digressions, no rhetoric, creating a book where everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated. The story, a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns a successful 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 his best friend and business partner. While struggling with the need to defend his honor, he fights a stronger inner desire for domestic tranquility and forgiveness. The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eca de Queiros in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy.