M

Unanimously reckoned as the foremost name

in Brazilian literature and one of the very

greatest masters of fiction in Portuguese,

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born a

poor mulatto on a Rio hill, where his parents

lived under the protection of the widow of

an empire grandee. He was brought up by a

kind stepmother, a negress. Still in his

teens, the self-taught boy, who learnt French

from the Gallic bakers of the Court district,

S. Cristo´va˜o, was helped by a Dickensian

figure, the printer and bookseller Paula Brito,

to enter the world of journalism and of the

belated Latin-American Romanticism; he

spent most of his twenties as a drama critic, a

translator (notably of Hugo and Dickens)

and a parliamentary reporter deeply attached

to liberal causes. His status improved at thirty,

when he became a government official and

when he married Carolina, the mature and

learned sister of his friend, a minor

Portuguese poet named Faustino Xavier de

Novaes. A tough social climber, he turned his

back on everything connected with his

humble past, including his stepmother.

Machado had suffered for long from epilepsy,

though of a milder kind than Dostoevsky’s.

Shortly before he was forty, a major crisis

forced him to a protracted convalescence in a

mountain resort near Rio. The result was a

baffling transformation of the outlook of his

work, issuing in the unique prose works