Quincas Borba by Macado de Assis
Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is a writer we should get to know. He was one of his country’s eminent 19th century authors, but his sensibility is easily understood today. “Come with me, reader,” he invites, signaling our entrance into his subjective world. And yet, the characters populating Quincas Borba cast a glaring light, as well as shadows, on worlds we continue to inhabit.
The novel contains two characters named Quincas Borba, one a pretentious philosopher and the other the dog he named for himself in a gesture of self-regard. De Assis calls the man “a castaway from reality” as the inventor of an inhumane, dogmatic, “scientific” doctrine that purports to explain everything. The dog is a more agreeable companion for the novel’s hapless protagonist, the aged philosopher’s caretaker, Rubião. When Borba dies, his fortune—and the dog—fall unexpectedly into the caretaker’s hands. Relatively innocent yet weak of character, Rubião is naïve, apprehensive and easily manipulated by the parcel of well-wishers attracted by his sudden wealth.
Delivered in short, snappy chapters that foresaw the direction of fiction, de Assis’ novel is plainspoken in a style closer to the 20th century than his own epoch. The snobbery, falsity and social climbing Rubião encounters are handled with warm, modern irony.
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