O Mandarim
Eça de Queirós
About the work
O Mandarim combines a fantastic moral experiment with nineteenth-century social satire. Teodoro, a poorly paid Lisbon copyist, receives a supernatural proposal in which the wealth he desires may depend on harm done to a distant stranger. The tale follows the pressure that money, reputation and guilt place on his judgement. Its China must be read critically: it is a European literary construction filtered through interested and unreliable voices, not a modern ethnographic account.
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