Raoul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon draws the viewer in with an atmosphere of mystery created through the art of understatement, rich color tones, close-ups on objects that play an important role in the story, and an economy of words. After watching both the cinematic and the TV versions, all I wanted was to immerse myself more in the story. I'd heard that Camilo Castelo Branco's book, which Ruiz's film is based on, had a story line even more intricate than one could fit even into a six-hour-long screen production. The book, itself inspired by Eugène Sue's Mystères de Paris (which I haven't read), is indeed a page turner, but I wouldn't compare it to Balzac or Dickens. Frankly, I can see why it hasn't been widely translated. While the story itself is very engaging, what really bugged me throughout the book was the excessive sentimentality of the narrative: all the good characters in the novel are swooning left and right, melting in tears, and being physically overcome by emotion. This works well once or twice: but I think Ruiz manages to infuse such episodes with more mystery, make them more ambiguous. For instance, in the novel, the young boy is bedridden as a result of an excess of emotion, whereas in the movie, the cause of his illness is less clear, possibly related to an onset of epilepsy.

I won't attempt to summarize the plot line -- I think this is the main reward of this book, where the writing style is rather plain and (to further debunk any parallels to Balzac) replaces any philosophical insights with religious moralizing. Where it gets anywhere near Dickens is in the intricate network of relationships, doubled and tripled, between the different characters. It is said of the Bleak House that it is the one novel of Dickens' that leaves no loose ends: the same can be said of Mystères de Lisbonne: all characters you encounter turn out to have crossed each other's paths in the past and do so again as the story unfolds, and a past action of one character would have influenced the life of another, often in surprising ways.

Rather than a translation into English, what I would love to see a talented novelist do is to rewrite the story by omitting all the sentimentalism and all the pious moralizing, and bring to it a bit more depth of thought, the way Raoul Ruiz did it on screen. ( )

Love and hate among aristocrats are the mainstream elements, pretty much as in the great novels of Balzac and, most especially, Eugène Sue, who wrote « Les Mystères de Paris ».