A reading list for Brazil - To the victor, the potatoes!

Brazil today, a shorter list, thank goodness.  To patriotic anonymous Brazilian visitors, be patient, read carefully, and be constructive – thanks in advance!

José de Alencar’s 1865 Iracema is a good place to start.  It is true post-colonial literature, a conscious early attempt to separate  Brazilian literature from Portugal.  Closer to a prose poem than a novel, I think it is more than a curiosity but a long ways from a masterpiece, as I said way back here, in the process offending a touchy, hasty visitor.

A few years later Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis succeeded in creating world-class Brazilian literature by a different path entirely, by adapting European literature to his own genius and locale, which happened to be Brazil.  All I am saying is that he does not rely on local color or artificial exoticism. An amazing proportion of what he wrote has migrated into English.

The Hand and the Glove (1874)
Helena (1876)
Iaiá Garcia (1878)

These books represent the first period in Machado de Assis’s career, when he wrote what I will call “plain ol’ novels.”  I am reading Helena now.  It is – what is the appropriate technical literary term? – it is OK.  I will finish it for research purposes, but then will avoid this phase unless there is special pleading.

In 1880 or so, Machado de Assis experienced some sort of health crisis and became an entirely different writer.  I do not know what happened, but his future fiction would be funnier, stranger, audacious, penetratingly ironic.  Everything changed, or almost everything.  This is the core set:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881, also translated for some reason as Epitaph for a Small Winner)
The Psychiatrist  (1882, a satirical novella)
Quincas Borbas (1891,  also translated, because it describes the book well, as Philosopher or Dog)
Dom Casmurro (1899)
Esau and Jacob (1904)
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908)

I have read the first two, as well as some excellent short stories, and am eager to read some or all of the last four.  They are all fairly short.  I have Quincas Borbas in front of me – I stole that thing about potatoes from it, Ch. 18.  This novel has 267 pages and 201 (!) chapters, some – I am reverting to The Posthumous Memoirs – digressive or otherwise perplexing, including, and I am again thinking of Bras Cubas, a famous one line chapter.  A short line, I mean.  Machado de Assis works on opposite principles from our great Modernist long sentence wonder workers.  He wants to smash his scenes to pieces, not stretch them out.  His narrators, as you might guess, are less than reliable, his literary allusions many, his approach to the world skeptical.

The Posthumous Memoirs seem to have become the representative Machado de Assis work among English readers, but I have read that this puzzles Brazilians; Dom Casmurro is the one they stuff down the throats of squirming schoolkids. Or perhaps Brazilian students are less neurotic about school reading than Americans.

I do not know if anyone is particularly interested in this, but Machado de Assis is, in the terms we use in the United States, black, a descendant of slaves.  In Brazilian terms, I have no idea, because I do not understand their complex racial classifications.

Some Brazilian non-fiction has been translated.  I doubt I will read Manuel Antonio de Almeida’s 1852 Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant or João Capistrano de Abreu’s 1907 Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500-1800 on my own, but I would be happy to read them with company.  Both are part of the Oxford University Press Library of Latin America series, which also publishes the late Machado de Assis novels as well as Aluísio Azevedo’s 1890 The Slum, an angry, possibly gritty, novel.

The one piece of Brazilian journalistic or historical writing that has caught my eye is Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 Rebellion in the Backlands or Backlands: The Canudo Campaign.  An account of the suppression of a provincial rebellion is turned by Euclides into something more complex, much of the complexity coming from the elaborate language of the book.  The style of the book has become as important as the subject.  Please begin here at Caravanas de Recuerdos for a description and samples.

I was poking around the internet, trying to figure out if Euclides da Cunha should be referred to as “Cunha” or “da Cunha,” only to discover that everyone just calls him Euclides!  All right then.

A final reminder:  any Brazilian poetry is fair game for a shared read, as is Portuguese poetry from Angola or Mozambique or Newark, New Jersey.  I have no list, though; my ignorance is total.

Corrections and additions are, as always, encouraged.