Machado de Assis

In Brazil, a New Rendering of a Literary Giant Makes Waves https://t.co/Vt1rfYLpUl

— Howard French (@hofrench) June 14, 2019

He’s One of Brazil’s Greatest Writers. Why Isn’t Machado de Assis More Widely Read? || The New Yorker

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Benjamin Moser for The New Yorker

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In the broader panorama of Brazilian society, this was unremarkable. (Most Brazilians were of mixed race.) So was his class background. Most Brazilians were poor, and Machado’s origins were a step above misery. His parents were literate. They belonged to the working class rather than to the lowest class—the enslaved.

But people of visibly mixed race were rare in the higher society that Machado entered while relatively young. As a boy, he had a knack for befriending helpful people: legend has it that a priest taught him Latin; an immigrant baker, French. At seventeen, working at a printer’s shop, he met intellectuals, and was soon publishing poems.

He was, at best, an indifferent employee. He was too busy reading, and did not earn enough to allow him to eat more than once a day. Yet the work he published, plays and poetry at first, was instantly acclaimed by a small but influential circle, and his first novel, “Resurrection,” published in 1872, inaugurated a critical success that continued until his death, thirty-six years later.

Machado’s unlikely social ascent attracted comment. Those who disliked him held his origins against him: one critic, in 1897, called him a “genuine representative of the mixed Brazilian sub-race.” Even his champions couldn’t help themselves. Miguel Pereira makes nearly forty mentions of his racial background—mostly gratuitous—in the three hundred pages of her biography.

The focus on this facet of his origin story obscures other surprising facts about his life. He was born in 1839, seventeen years after Brazilian independence—and only thirty-one years after the first book was printed in Rio de Janeiro. For three hundred and eight years after the Portuguese first reached Brazil, printing was forbidden throughout the colony. An entire country was not allowed to think for itself.

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Machado de Assis - Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881)

@internetArchive

Machado de Assis - Epitaph of a Small Winner (The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas) || internet Archive

Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
1881

Read one of the most creative literary work ever @internet Archive

Machado de Assis || o Dia da Abolição da Escravatura e Machado de Assis na Missa Campal

Machado de Assis


brasilianafotografica

Bendito o olhar de lince de Andrea Wanderley, que identificou o rosto de Machado de Assis na foto de Antônio Luís Ferreira da missa celebrada em 17 de maio de 1888, no Campo de São Cristóvão, em ação de graças pela passagem da lei do dia 13 desse mês que abolira a escravidão no Brasil.

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Mas o registro importante hoje é a descoberta de que Machado foi à missa. Não era pessoa de frequentar igrejas. Também não apreciava manifestações multitudinárias. Mas a essa missa, a esse ajuntamento de milhares de pessoas, ele compareceu e fica claro na foto seu esforço para aparecer, prensado entre duas robustas figuras uniformizadas. Anos depois, em crônica (Gazeta de Notícias, 14/5/1893), ele anotou sobre o 13 de maio, “Verdadeiramente, foi o único dia de delírio público que me lembra ter visto”. A missa foi continuação do delírio e é muito bom saber que o tímido, circunspecto e cético Machado estava lá.

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