Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis is not as widely acclaimed outside Brazil as an author of his caliber deserves to be. Among his works are novels, short stories, plays and poems of great literary quality, always witty and still current more than a century after their publication.

Considered by many as Brazil's greatest writer of all times, his style is extraordinary and exposes the many social dysfunctions of 19th century Brazil (and often of today, interestingly enough). Literary critic Harold Bloom places Machado de Assis alongside writers such as Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes.

His father was a son of freed slaves who married a Portuguese housekeeper. Machado de Assis learned to read by himself, and spoke French and English fluently. He started off by working as a typesetter for newspapers, where he later published his first works. Apart from his own writing, he also translated many of Shakespeare's work into Portuguese.

2008 marks the centennial of his death, and here is a bit of his book The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, translated by Gregory Rabassa. Enjoy!

"For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.

With that said, I expired at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August, 1869, at my beautiful suburban place in Catumbi. I was sixty-four intense and prosperous years old, I was a bachelor, I had wealth of around three hundred contols, and I was accompanied to the cemetery by eleven friends. Eleven friends! The fact is, there hadn't been any cards or announcements. On top of that it was raining--drizzling--a thin, sad, constant rain, so constant and so sad that it led one of those last-minute faithful friends to insert this ingenious idea into the speech he was making at the edge of my grave: "You who knew him, gentlemen, can say with me that nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with. This somber air, these drops from heaven, those dark clouds that cover the blue like funeral crepe, all of it is the cruel and terrible grief that gnaws at nature and at my deepest insides; all that is sublime praise for our illustrious deceased.

Good and faithful friend! No, I don't regret the twenty bonds I left you."