In his lifetime, Joachim Maria Machado de Assis (1939-1908) was Brazil’s most important author, his homeland’s Balzac or Dickens. He rose from humble circumstances; his paternal family had been slaves and his mother a Portuguese immigrant. He was befriended by educated people who encouraged the precocious lad to write—and to enter government service, parallel vocations he maintained with no apparent tension. As a mulatto, Machado could climb high enough in Brazil’s social ladder to observe the upper class up close.
As an assayer of the human heart, he deserves to be better known among English speakers. The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (Liveright) is a massive tome, which gathers 76 short stories, several in English for the first time. Machado was adept at sketching memorably flawed characters; he was acutely aware of mixed motives, rendering with few words his gallery of dissolute dandies, fortune seekers, poseurs and women navigating romance and property with the skill of a Jane Austen heroine. Masterfully ironic, Machado’s stories are often sophisticated social satires, aware of themselves as literature and of the difficulty of language in expressing the fullness of experience.
He was also capable of tender tragedy. “Nuptial Song’s” musician protagonist wants to compose but is unable to find the melody he seeks until he hears it hummed by a stranger as he is about to die.
