Two weeks ago, one of the greatest Brazilian writer would complete 175 years old, so this post is a tribute to this realistic and trendsetter writer. This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://repositories.tdl.org/ttu-ir/bitstream/handle/2346/22305/31295005862775.pdf? The second was published at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/books/13mach.html?pagewanted=all&.
Machado de Assis has been considered the greatest prose fiction writer in all of Brazil`s history. This view is not only held by Brazilians critics, but is the consensus of scholars all over the world. Machado wrote nine novels between 1872 and 1908. The first four have accurately been considered experimental. They do contain a number of the techniques for which Machado has become well known, but they do not demonstrate either the complex and unpredictable plots or the fully developed characters seen in the last five, commonly regarded as his major works. Paul Dixon `s work, "Retired Dreams", points to the characteristics of the Spanish American novel, beginning in the 1950`s determined by Carlos Fuentes and outlines five characteristics. Dixon discusses Dom Casmurro with these characteristics in mind, yet one could just as easily find them in Machado other novels as well. This places Machado`s novels at least fifty years ahead of the blooming Spanish American novel of the 1950s. Scholars who study Brazilian literature, as well as Brazilians, argue that Machado deserve international recognition. To support this claim one can point to his modernity and universality. His novels, like the works of many of the great literary masters, he alludes to throughout them, present ideas and problems which transcend time and culture. Many Brazilians have criticized Machado for not having stronger opinions about Brazilians problems. In fact, he wrote about human nature. He wrote about the way people think and analyzed their motivations. His ideas on psychology often anticipated Freud. Although it was brazilian society from which he gathered his ideas, Machado`s novels are not limited to it. In short, Machado`s modernity and his universality make him a precursor of twentieth-century Latin America literature.
When the novelist Machado de Assis died 100 years ago this month, his passing went little noticed outside his native Brazil. But in recent years he has been transformed from a fringe figure in the English-speaking world into a literary favorite , promoted by much more acclaimed writers and by critics as an unjustly neglected genius. Susan Sontag, an early and ardent admirer, once called him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America," surpassing even Borges. Comparisons to Flaubert and Henry James, Beckett and Kafka abound. John Barth and Donald Barthelme have claimed him as an influence. All of that makes for a change of fortune that Machado, with his esquisite sense of the improbable, would surely have appreciated. After all, his most celebrated novel, "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas," purports to be the autobiography of a decadent aristocrat reflecting on his life`s disappointments and failures from beyond the grave. The critic Harold Bloom describe Machado as "a kind of miracle." Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, Machado was the grandson of slaves, his father a housepainter and his mother a immigrant washerwoman from the Azores Island. Enormously cultured and erudite, he was largely self-taught, working as a typesetter`s apprentice and journalist before becoming a novelist, poet and playwright. Eventually Machado took a post in the Ministry of Agriculture, married a Portuguese woman of a noble descent and settled into a middle-class life that allowed him to build a parallel carrer as a translator of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and other. But around 40, suffering from epilepsy, his health worsened, and he nearly lost his sight. Over the next years Machado produced the five interlinked novels that made his reputation. Though foreign critics tend to regard the exuberantly nihilistic "Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,"(1881), as his masterpiece, many Brazilians prefer the more melancholy "Dom Casmurro"(1899), focuses on the corrosive effect of sexual jealousy. Roberto Schwarz, one of Brazil`s foremost expert on Machado, said. "What you see in the five novels and his short stories from that period is a writer without illusions, courageous and cynical, who is highly civilized but at the same time implacable in exposing the hypocrisy of modern man accommodating himself to conditions that are intolerable." Many writers who admire Machado see his work as a precursor to some of the most significant trends of the last century. Alan Ginsberg describe him as "another Kafka" and Philip Roth drew parallels between Machado and Beckett. Mr. Roth said, "he is a great ironist, a tragic comedian. In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh, he is ironic about suffering." Critics have wondered why it took so long for the English-speaking world to appreciate Machado. Mr. Schwarz said, "it is always good for a writer to be recognized, Machado is being given the esteem he deserves because of his huge capacity to universalize local problems."
