CLÁSSICOS BRASILEIROS BRAZILIAN CLASSICS - Imprensa Oficial

Brazilian Classics
A selection of authors with works in public domain
82
MACHADO DE ASSIS
(1839 – 1908)
Born in 1839 and died in 1908, Machado de
Assis is the great classic who, harboring all the
western writing tradition, takes the Brazilian
literature to the great and decisive discoveries of
the 20th century. The introduction of an updated
philosophical view led him to break off, still in
the 19th century, with the narrative linearity,
embedding into his work what is fragmentary,
elliptical, and incomplete. While creating an
entirely personal style that was not affected by
any literary school, although pervaded by a fine
pessimistic irony, this novelist, story writer, poet,
playwright, columnist, and essayist combined,
like anybody else before, the balance between
nationality and universality. Going beyond the
romantic view that sought for an authentic Brazil
by incorporating the Brazilian landscape and
explicitly non-European elements, Machado de
Assis wins definitive autonomy for the Brazilian
fiction by privileging an urban landscape, whose
characters are full of ambiguities and insoluble
contradictions. Starting from local themes,
unveiling reality in its raw and non-rhetorical
aspect, he became a writer tuned with his time
and yet atemporal, national and yet universal ...
ultimately, one of the greatest in the world.
Review
Main works
Excerpt
Posthumous memoirs of Brás Cubas
As a matter of fact, one morning, as I walked in
the villa, an idea got hung on the trapeze I used
to have in the brain. Once it got hung, it started
to wave the arms, to stamp the feet, to caper
in the boldest leaps one can possibly believe. I
was just there watching it. In all of a sudden, it
sprang up in a great jump, extended the arms
and legs and took the shape of an X: make out
my meaning or I'll eat you. This idea was nothing
less than the contrivance of a sublime medicine,
an anti-hypochondriac poultice, concocted to
bring a relief to our melancholic humankind
[...]. However, I didn't conceal from my friends
the financial advantages that could result from
the distribution of a product with such sizeable
and deep effects. But now, as I come here to this
other side of life, I can admit everything: what
influenced me most was the gratification of seeing
these three words printed in the newspapers,
display cases, pamphlets, corners, and eventually
in the medicine boxes: Brás Cubas' Poultice.
Why should I deny it? I had a lust for bustle, for
the poster, for the rocket of tears.
From deep Brazil to urban and modern roughness
"Machado de Assis travels the difficult road from deep Brazil to urban roughness. [...] The wizard from Cosme Velho, as
he was often called, in a way to link him to the name of the neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro where he lived his last years,
a partisan of dilemma or enigma, he anticipated the suspicion, the double-dealing, the multiplicity, such modem city
emblems."
(Eduardo Portella, "Machado de Assis, Cronista do Rio de Janeiro")
The contemporaneity of ambiguity
His technique consists essentially in hinting at the most amazing things in the whitest way; or in establishing a contrast
between social normality of facts and its essential abnormality; or in suggesting, under the disguise of the contrary, that
the exceptional action is normal, and that the commonplace would be abnormal. This is why he is modem, in spite of the
archaism in the surface."
(Antonio Candido, "Esquema de Machado de Assis")
Contos fluminenses (1869); A mão e a luva (1874); Helena (1876); laiá Garcia (1878); Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
(1881); Papéis avulsos (1882); Quincas Borba (1891); Várias histórias (1896); Dom Casmurro (1899); Poesias completas
(1901); Esaú e Jacó (1904); Memorial de Aires (1908).