Machado De Assis - Böcker

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the AmericasMachado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and half-hearted political ambitions, serves up hare-brained philosophies and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to works by Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories presents a compelling collection of tales by Machado de Assis, Brazil’s literary master of psychological depth and ironic wit. Best known for his novels Dom Casmurro and Epitaph of a Small Winner, Machado’s short stories, as critics have noted, distill his artistry into compact narratives of profound insight. This volume offers English-speaking readers a rich sampling of his ability to explore human frailty, social absurdities, and the blurred boundaries between reason and madness. With a style that suggests more than it states, Machado’s work has been compared to Pascal’s meditations on human folly, Swift’s biting satire, and even Kierkegaard’s existential critiques, reinforcing his place among the great literary minds of modernity.The title story, The Psychiatrist, serves as a prime example of Machado’s deft critique of rigid rationalism and scientific absolutism. Dr. Bacamarte, in his obsessive quest to define and cure madness, ultimately calls into question the very nature of sanity itself. Other stories in the collection, such as Midnight Mass and Education of a Stuffed Shirt, reflect Machado’s fascination with human hypocrisy, unspoken desires, and the subtle power of social expectations. Whether through political satire, psychological realism, or philosophical inquiry, Machado de Assis masterfully exposes the tensions between individual identity and societal norms, making these stories as relevant today as they were in nineteenth-century Brazil.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 1963.

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories presents a compelling collection of tales by Machado de Assis, Brazil’s literary master of psychological depth and ironic wit. Best known for his novels Dom Casmurro and Epitaph of a Small Winner, Machado’s short stories, as critics have noted, distill his artistry into compact narratives of profound insight. This volume offers English-speaking readers a rich sampling of his ability to explore human frailty, social absurdities, and the blurred boundaries between reason and madness. With a style that suggests more than it states, Machado’s work has been compared to Pascal’s meditations on human folly, Swift’s biting satire, and even Kierkegaard’s existential critiques, reinforcing his place among the great literary minds of modernity.The title story, The Psychiatrist, serves as a prime example of Machado’s deft critique of rigid rationalism and scientific absolutism. Dr. Bacamarte, in his obsessive quest to define and cure madness, ultimately calls into question the very nature of sanity itself. Other stories in the collection, such as Midnight Mass and Education of a Stuffed Shirt, reflect Machado’s fascination with human hypocrisy, unspoken desires, and the subtle power of social expectations. Whether through political satire, psychological realism, or philosophical inquiry, Machado de Assis masterfully exposes the tensions between individual identity and societal norms, making these stories as relevant today as they were in nineteenth-century Brazil.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 1963.

The rich and eccentric philosopher Quincas Borbas names his dog after himself because he knows his pet will outlive him. Quincas does die first, leaving his fortune to his friend Rube provided that he takes care for the dog. The dim-witted friend is hardly prepared for the life that awaits him.

Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is the great Brazilian author of Philosopher or Dog? and Epitaph of a Small Winner, whose work is admired by writers as different as Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, Woody Allen and Susan Sontag. Taken from his mature period, these dazzling stories echo Poe and Gogol, anticipate Joyce, and have been compared to the writing of Chekhov, Maupassant and Henry James, yet his modern sensibility and clear-eyed humour remain utterly unique.

'I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing'. So begins the posthumous memoir of Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian. While the grave may have given Cubas the distance to examine his rather undistinguished life, it has certainly not dampened his sense of humour. Epitaph of a Small Winner is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history.

The later novels of Machado de Assis -- notably Dom Casmurro and Esau and Jacob -- are well known in this country, but the earlier novels have never been translated. Here, in The Hand and the Glove (the Brazilian master's second novel), rendered in English for the first time by Albert I. Bagby, Jr., readers will find a younger, gentler Assis, writing a romantic comedy that is yet permeated with the lively wit characteristic of his later works.The story is a simple one-of love lost and love found. Of love lost by Estêvão, amiable but vacillating, who is bemused by his own romantic posturing, and by Jorge, superficial and calculating. Of love found by Luis Alves, whose self-possession and determination seem destined to carry him far. The love of all three men is the proud and beautiful Guiomar, sure of her own heart but unsure, until faced by rival claims, of where to bestow it -- a foreshadowing of Capitú, the intriguing heroine of Dom Casmurro."English-speaking readers," says Helen Caldwell in the Foreword, "who are already acquainted with Machado de Assis will welcome this latest addition to the translated novels. True, it is a period piece; but its quaintness is a charm to carry us back to the Rio de Janeiro of the 1850s -- to vanished courtly elegance arid attitudes.... Now, we too can know what drew [Assis] back to this early tale, for The Hand and the Glove recreates in English the elegant background, the charming heroine, the comedy, and the light-hearted ebullience of the Portuguese original."

The last of four novels that preceded Machado de Assis's famous trilogy of realistic masterpieces, Iaiá Garcia belongs to what critics have called the Brazilian author's "romantic" phase. But it is far more than that implies. Like his other early works, Iaiá Garcia foreshadows the themes and characters of Assis's most masterful novels.Iaiá Garcia intertwines the lives of three characters in a subtly and wryly developing relationship. While the youthful Iaiá is growing into womanhood, a tentative love affair occurs between the aristocratic Jorge and the prideful Estela. This affair is afflicted by ironic shifts of fortune and in time the maturing Iaiá becomes a rival for Jorge's attentions. Assis's portrayal of the relationship among these three characters is a perceptive study of uncompromising pride, thwarted love, jealousy, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and attainment.As the translator, Albert I. Bagby, Jr., contends, the story of Iaiá, Jorge, and Estela reflects the formula that Assis saw as fundamental to human life: "Will and ambition, when they truly dominate, can struggle with other feelings, but they are the weapons of the strong, and victory belongs to the strong." In Assis's view success comes to the strong and failure to the weak. But both inhabit a world that is neutral-neither helping one nor hindering the other. The outcome of events in Iaiá Garcia may not seem entirely optimistic, but neither is it pessimistic. And Mr. Bagby concludes, "Perhaps to understand the optimism of Assis one needs only to be... a hard, pragmatic realist.... "Whether hard realists or unregenerate romantics, readers of this novel will find it a compelling tale of love lost and won. Like his earlier translation of Assis's The Hand & the Glove, Mr. Bagby's English rendering of Iaiá Garcia from the original Portuguese is done with both accuracy and sensitivity.