ABSTRACT
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