It is not simple to read a virtually unknown book that, suddenly, is supposed to be one of the greatest 19th-century novels. Margaret Jull Costa, translator of José Saramago and Javier Marías, has recently turned to José Maria Eça de Queirós, reputedly the great national author of Portugal. And the resulting translation, of Eça’s masterpiece “The Maias” (New Directions, 628 pages, $17.95) wants entry into our closed canons.

For a few hundred pages, I was disappointed. Hoping for a family epic, I found a fin-de-siècle morality tale of thin ambitions treading on thick, luxuriant carpets. Lisbon is not Paris or London; it did not corrupt Eça’s young men with suitable dazzling force. Like Flaubert, Eça skewers the pretentiousness of 19th-century social climbers, but Portuguese pretentiousness looked like small fry in comparison: The follies of a few well-meaning dandies did not immediately justify the roomy designs of Eça’s monumental novel.

But as I read on, into the long straightaway that, comprising only two years of the novel’s 70-year narrative, takes up the majority of its pages, I began to appreciate Eça’s emotional point. WhereacharactersuchasHomais, Flaubert’s pedantic pharmacist, stays face up, a fool, in reader’s minds, Eça’s aristocratic fools have a flip side: Their civic and national damnation. Ridiculous as they may be, they always have the excuse of whistling in the darkness. In Eça’s hands, a Flaubertian fool becomes a tragic symbol.

“The Maias” begins with the renovation of a house. A grandfather and his grandson are all that remain of the great Maia family. Afonso, the grandfather, was once a Voltaire-reading exile, living in England, but by 1875 he has become an eagle of the Ancien Régime: Venerated by his own peers, he stands throughout the novel for passive power. When his own, melancholic son commits suicide, Afonso consoles himself with his infant grandson, whose boyish good cheer promises the regeneration of the family line, and by analogy, Portugal. But instead of growing up to be a national leader, the young Carlos graduates from the University of Coimbra a diletantish doctor, and, when he and Afonso agree to move in together in Lisbon, it is house decoration that most excites him.

He does up his grandfather’s study “like a prelate’s chamber,” using red damasks, sober oak bookshelves, and “a venerable old armchair, whose faded silk upholstery still bore the Maia coat of arms.” The silk-lined walls of Carlos’s own rooms remind the family’s shocked administrator of a boudoir.

Their very different rooms, however, shock neither grandfather nor grandson. The conservative and the libertine understand each other. In Eça de Queirós’s Portugal, excess is expected in every generation — romantics, naturalists, and aesthetes frequently converge around one table, and drink the same champagne. Alencar, a poet who knew Carlos’s melancholic father, sports “a long romantic moustache, grown white with age and yellow with nicotine,” and recalls the time “when young men still had a little fire in their blood from the various civil wars, a fire they tried to quell by wrecking bars and driving poor tired old coach-horses nearly into the ground.” Less violent but just as wasteful, Carlos is no different.

This is one of the masterfully depressing things about Eça’s vision: Afonso, in his way, is just as much a failure as his grandson Carlos. Neither is seriously devoted to his profession, though Carlos sees a patient from time to time. Both while away their evenings with whist and piano songs. Both stand head and shoulders above their friends, yet they humor them; Carlos, in particular, goes around town like Romeo, in a posse of exuberant fools.

One of these, João da Ega, is based on Eça de Queirós himself. A kind of ineffectual Oscar Wilde, Ega wears a fur coat in summer and organizes a costume ball that will “test the genius of a whole society.” Ega is Carlos’ leader in things aesthetic, but because Carlos is less extreme, he turns out to have the better taste. It is therefore Ega who suffers the first and most farcical scandal of their young lives. Earning the insult of a Jewish banker named Cohen, whose wife he has slept with, Ega has to leave Lisbon. Old Afonso mutters, “A bad beginning, my boy, a very bad beginning indeed!”

This is the turning point of “The Maias.” It is engrossing to watch the young men’s cockiness turn morbid. After Ega’s disaster, Carlos passively gives in to an affair of his own. What had seemed like an entitlement becomes a mortal sin. The young men peer into the crystal ball of their own inertia. Like their lesser friends, they blame the crudeness of their country. Why write a book in a country with no readers?

In the background sits Afonso, wondering after his grandson Carlos, whom he adores. Cajoled into believing that Carlos and Ega are finally starting their much vaunted new magazine, he declares he could never contribute a column. Afonso has only three things to say to the country of Portugal:

To the politicians: ‘less liberalism and more character’; to the men of letters: ‘less eloquence and more ideas’; to the citizenry in general: ‘less progress and more morality.’

Ega and Carlos are smart enough to prize Afonso’s aphorism — they want it for the frontispiece. But the magazine never happens: They cannot agree on a typeface, nor do they know any decent writers.

Eça de Queirós, as a writer, does not match Tolstoy or Dickens; his clean, slightly ironical prose has a generic quality. If anything, he distinguishes himself by a bathos that emphasizes his critique of Portugal — mixing up cheese pastries in scenes of operatic passion. But, as a builder of novels, Eça may deserve some immortality. “The Maias,” in its 600-page heave, does go somewhere.

The noble love affair, that soon destroys Carlos and Afonso both, did not mean as much to me as the friendship between Carlos and Ega. When there are two equals, who can appreciate each other’s failure without judging it, the decline of Portugal becomes prophetic. Insofar as this novel is autobiographical, it is Eça’s statement of historical vantage: Young romantics may come and go, but it was only with his generation that they understood their own historical futility.

blytal@nysun.com