Prolonged illness (Machado was epileptic), and the near loss of his sight, snapped him to attention. Out of a regimen of ferocious self-education, he established himself, initially as a writer of slender romances for and about the women of the ruling elite.īut in 1879, his style changed - or rather, it arrived. He had no formal education or training like Twain, his contemporary, he got his start as a printer’s apprentice. The protean, stubbornly unclassifiable Machado was born into poverty, the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves. What’s going on here? What kind of writer induces such rapturous and wildly inconsistent characterizations? What kind of writer can star in so many different fantasies? To further complicate matters, Machado has always reminded me of Alice Munro. In the foreword to “The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis,” published this month, the critic Michael Wood invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding, Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino - all in two paragraphs. Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and Joyce. Harold Bloom called him a descendant of Laurence Sterne, and Philip Roth compared him to Beckett. To Stefan Zweig, Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens. In the Anglophone world, a similar kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the son and sly chronicler of Rio de Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America.”
“A tree trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way around a leg. “Nonsense an elephant is a fan,” says another, who holds an ear.
“An elephant is like a snake,” says one, grasping the trunk. Newly translated by Gregory Rabassa and superbly edited by Enylton de Sa Rego and Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, this Library of Latin America edition brings to English-speaking readers a literary delight of the highest order.In a famous Hindu parable, three blind men encounter an elephant for the first time and try to describe it, each touching a different part. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.īy turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. "Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.
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