José Maria de Eça de Queirós

Portugal’s sharpest novelist spent his working life as a consul — Havana, Newcastle, Bristol, Paris — and wrote the country from a distance. Coimbra, the Farpas, then the books that took Lisbon apart: a priest, a cousin, a great family rotting in style, a holy relic, a manor, the city against the hills. O Mandarim is one fable in the drawer. He died in Paris. Lisbon is still answering him.