José Maria Eça de Queirós, 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 Eça de Queirós in
the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and
Tolstoy.