Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell's seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he's funny as hell.”

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

DIVA translation of Schwarz's study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839-1908)./div

Discusses life, time, beauty, experience, meaning, music, and art.

This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature’s greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning. It is from this discovery about the nature of language as a self-referential semiotic system that Machado crafts his “new narrative.” Long celebrated in Brazil as a dazzlingly original writer, Machado has struggled to gain respect and attention outside the Luso-Brazilian ken. He is the epitome of the “outsider” or “marginal,” the iconoclastic and wildly innovative genius who hails from a culture rarely studied in the Western literary hierarchy and so consigned to the status of “eccentric.” Had the Brazilian master written not in Portuguese but English, French, or German, he would today be regarded as one of the true exemplars of the modern novel, in expression as well as in theory. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The love story that the Counselor narrates revolves around Fedilia and Tristao, who both are the godchildren of childless couple Aguiar and Dona Carmo. It is thought that the marriage between Aquiar and Dona Carmo is modeled after the relationship between de Assis and his wife, Caroline. The Counselorʹs diary entries chronicles Fideliaʹs transition from a widow bent on a lifelong habit of mourning her dead husband to a woman who rediscovers the world of the living and of love. Written in the late 1880s, the counselorʹs diary documents some of the social changes taking place in Brazil. There are several mentions of slavery and its abolition on May 13, 1888. The counselor does not himself engage much with the issue saying that old ways of thinking prevail even as he recognizes that he should assume more responsibility and interest in the matter. This stance apparently reflects the authorʹs own public disengagement with the issue of slavery and its abolition. de Assis, whose father was a mulatto, has been heavily criticized for not politicizing his works and addressing the plight of black Brazilians in his works. I disagree with this sentiment. -- Description from http://kinnareads.wordpress.com (Oct. 24, 2011).

Machado de Assis is among the most original creative minds in Brazil's rich, four-century-long literary tradition. Caldwell's critical and biographical study explores Machado's purpose, meaning, and artistic method in each of his nine novels, published between 1872 and 1908. She traces the ideas and recurrent themes, and identifies his affinities with other authors. In tracing Machado's experimentation with narrative techniques, Caldwell reveals the increasingly subtle use he made of point of view, sometimes indirect or reflected, sometimes multiple and "nested" like Chinese boxes. Caldwell shows the increasing sureness with which he individualized his characters, and how, in advance of his time, he developed action, not by realistic detail, but by the boldest use of allusion and symbol. Each novel is shown to be an artistic venture, and not in any sense a regurgitation from a sick soul as some critics have argued. IN searching out the unity of his novels, Caldwell explores the other aspects of Machado's intellectual life--as poet,journalist, playwright, conversationalist, and academician. Of particular interest is her attention to his shift away from the social criticism of his early novels into the labyrinth of individual psychology in the last five--all of which rank among the world literature. But this perceptive account never loses sight of the one element present in every piece of Machado's fiction, in eery one of his personages; that is, superlative comedy, in its whole range: wit, irony, satire, parody, burlesque, humor. Altogether, Caldwell reveals to us a writer, in essence a poet, who is still the altus prosator of Brazilian letters. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

This first novel in its debut English translation visits themes the author developed exquisitely throughout his career including marriage, memory, and perspective. In this insightful translation by Karen Sherwood Sotelino, and with an introduction by Jos� Luiz Passos, the novel reveals the author’s early experiment in drawing out psychological and sociological issues of his times. Readers familiar with his mature works will recognize the progression from infatuation, through passion, doubt, and toxic jealousy, as experienced by protagonists F�lix and L�via in 19th century Rio de Janeiro.