Fusion, transfusion, diffusion, confusion, and profusion - Machado de Assis at his Dalkeyest

Four years ago I read three collections of the short stories of the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.  With a bit of scrounging in anthologies I ended up reading forty of his stories.  Since then three more collections have been published in English, increasing both the quantity of good stories available and also the redundancy.  The novella The Psychiatrist or The Alienist (1881-2) is now published, and in print, in three different translations, for example.

Good news, but confusing.  Now there is room for specialization.  I read Selected Short Stories (2014), translated by Rhett McNeil, published by Dalkey Archive, and the title is accurate – these stories (1878-86), including The Psychiatrist,  are specifically selected to show the most experimental side of Machado.  These are the Dalkeyest of his stories.

There was once a barrel-maker and demagogue named Bernardino, who, in the realm of cosmography, professed a belief that the world was an enormous tunnel of marmalade, and in the realm of politics insisted that the throne should belong to the people.  (“The Dictionary,” 90)

The barrel-maker becomes king and through a series of events kicks off a language reform, including a Dictionary of Babel:

There wasn’t a single phrase that bore resemblance to the spoken language.  Consonants scrambled atop consonants, vowels were diluted by other vowels, words with two syllables now had seven or eight and vice versa, everything was jumbled, mixed up; a complete absence of vigor, of elegance: a language of shards and tatters.  (93)

That last phrase, especially, has a pure Dalkey flavor to it.

In the next story, “The Academies of Siam,” a king and his favorite concubine switch bodies – why not? – and learn a valuable lesson about their advisors.  “She couldn’t understand how it was that fourteen men gathered together in an academy could be the light of the world, yet, individually be a bunch of camels” (103).  In the next, “The Priest, or The Metaphysics of Style,” Machado describes the journey of an adjective and a noun in a priest’s brain, before they are joined romantically and written on a page.

Give me your hand, dear lady, my reader; stay close to me, good sir, good reader.  Let’s trudge along with them.  (108)

Conceptual, satirical, odd, that is the rule in this collection.  Lots of parables of artistic creation.  “Fusion, transfusion, diffusion, confusion, and profusion of beings and objects” (“Ex Cathedra,” 129)

The playful conceptual stories show an essential side of Machado de Assis.  It is hardly his only side, though.  We will have to go elsewhere for his poignant social protests (“Father against Mother”) or his Chekhovian psychological insight (“Midnight Mass”).  Aside from the political parody of The Psychiatrist, there is surprisingly little of Brazil in Selected Stories.  There is plenty about Brazil in stories in Machado’s other modes.

Perhaps someday someone will publish in English Machado’s stories as they were originally published.  A complete and non-redundant set would be handy.  Still, it’s not so bad now, is it?

The Portuguese Literature Challenge signoff with many thank-yous

Cruges, after a silence, shrugged and muttered:

“Even if I wrote a good opera, who would put it on?”

“And if Ega wrote a fine book, who would read it?”

The maestro concluded:  “This country is simply impossible.  I think I’ll have a coffee too.”  (The Maias, Ch. VIII, 192)

Now just hang on a minute, pal!  What have I been doing since August if not reading the finest Portuguese books?

When I launched the Portuguese Literature Challenge, I guessed that I would be sick of it all by the end of April.  Pretty close.  Know thyself.  So this is a wrap-up.  I do not have any original insights into Portugal or Brazil or their literatures but I did read a lot of good books in good company.

Although I wandered around plenty, three authors took up most of my time, as they should have.  I have written so much about them that I will limit myself to notes and thank yous.

Machado de Assis.  Shelf Love Jenny joined me for The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.  The last five novels of Machado (I only got to four of them) are uniquely odd and inventive.  My greatest surprise, though, was discovering Machado’s accomplishment as a short story writer.  I came across a critic who credited Machado with “at least sixty world-class masterpieces” of short fiction, which is absurd, but a couple dozen, now that is not absurd at all.  And how often does Machado show up in short story anthologies?  So I understand the special pleading.  I had no idea.  Rise and mel u wrote about Machado’s short stories, and mel’s post has links to posts about some other Brazilian short stories.

Eça de Queirós.  “[E]verything he wrote was enjoyable” says Borges, and with nine of his books behind me I will agree.  His character work is especially good.  Please see Richard and litlove, who both have interesting things to say about The Crime of Father Amaro, and Scott Bailey on The Illustrious House of Ramires.

As good as Eça typically is, though, his best book is clearly The Maias.  Also his longest, by far, sorry, but the length is part of what makes it the best.  The Maias has no more story or plot or characters than Amaro or Cousin Basilio, for example.  Very similar, actually, which likely frustrates some readers.  So the novel is not "epic Eça."  For whatever reason, Eça chose this particular book as his masterpiece and worked on it more.  It has a more complex, multi-layered pattern than the other books.  I am not sure that it is more meaningful than his other novels, but it is more intricate.  It has a higher thread count than his other tapestries.  Not everyone, I know, thinks this means "best."

Fernando Pessoa.  An original, an endless source of puzzles and ideas.  You do not even have to read his work for him to generate ideas, but just read about him and his system of heteronyms.   Please see seraillon for a recent post on The Book of Disquiet and a piece about Antonio Tabucchi and Pessoa.

I also want to thank Miguel of St. Orberose, whose blog and comments here pointed me in all sorts of useful directions.

What should I do next?  Austria, Italy?  19th century plays?  The 1890s?  Maybe too big, that one.  The late 1890s?  19th century literary criticism – but who would want to read along with that?  Mountaineering books?  Old timey kiddie lit?  Ideas welcome.

And thanks again for everyone’s assistance, participation, spurs to thought, and generally enthusiastic attitude.

The verb rigidly defined the action - Machado de Assis in the courtroom and dressing room

The pair of Machado de Assis stories Clifford E. Landers translated for Words without Borders a couple of years ago are excellent; perhaps I should say more about them.  Curious reader can test my impressions against them and can come back here and really rake me over the coals.  One is “A Visit from Alcibiades”; t’other is “Justice Unbalanced.”  The former is the only English translation of the story; the latter exists in another version more accurately but somehow irritatingly titled “Wallow, Swine!” (“Suje-se Gordo”).

“A Visit from Alcibiades” is deliberately minor, but still tasty.  The narrator, reading Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades,  somehow summons the Athenian general and dandy.  After some fuss, the story turns out to be a satire on clothes – thus the need for Alcibiades in particular.  The narrator is going to dress the Athenian for a ball:

"Black tubes!" he exclaimed.

These were the black trousers that I had just put on.  He exclaimed and laughed, a cynical laugh in which surprise mingled with mockery, greatly offending my sensitivity as a modern man.  Because, Your Excellency will note, although to us our times may seem deserving of criticism, even of execration, we dislike it when an ancient ridicules them to our face.

That last line is prime Machadian (Assisisian?) humor, as is an earlier aphorism, “death is the ultimate sarcasm.”  Next in the narrative comes, each more absurd than the last, the cravat,  then the frock coat, then, as a climax, the hat, and I suppose I should stop there.  I said it was minor!  But the sense of Machado in the story is strong.

“Justice Unbalanced” is more clearly one of those Masterpieces of World Literature.  The narrator tells us about two terms on a criminal jury.  In the first trial, he and his fellow jurors convict a man of a minor forgery.  The narrator is shocked by a “corpulent and redheaded” fellow juror who seems to judge the guilt of the defendant by the pettiness of his crime.  I am going to switch to the quite different, more vivid version of the story found in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories and the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story:

“And all for twenty dollars, a pittance.  Let the swine wallow in his filth!  Wallow, swine, wallow!”

“Wallow, swine!”  I confess I was astonished.  Not that I understood him nor felt that he was being fair, and that’s why I was astonished.

The big twisteroo occurs when the narrator again serves on a jury, and the defendant turns out to be the red-headed juror, now thin, charged with embezzling a huge amount of money.  No matter what the other evidence might be, the narrator is sure of the man’s guilt.  I will switch back to Landers for contrast:

The verb rigidly defined the action.  "Steal something big!"  It means a man shouldn't commit an act of that kind except for a considerable sum.  No one should defile himself for a few coins.  If you're going to steal, steal something big!

The story ends on an ambivalent note with the narrator drawing a quite different lesson from the story than I did, one that focuses my attention on his motives and psychology.

A couple of days ago I claimed that the stories of Machado de Assis were unlike his novels, but my last claim is exactly of a piece with the novels.

I hope someone is currently translating another collection of Machado de Assis stories for me.

It doesn’t mean anything, but it’ll become popular right away - pop Machado de Assis

The Machado de Assis short story “The Celebrity” (“Um Homem Célebre”) caught my attention with its subject.  It is an 1888 story about a pop musician, a songwriter.  I do not know any earlier fiction on the subject, although I wish I did, because I would like to read it.  This one begins:

“Oh, so you’re Pestana?” asked Miss Mota, with a sweeping gesture of admiration.  And immediately correcting her familiar address: “Pardon my manners, but… are you really he?”

Annoyed and dispirited, Pestana answered yes, it was he.

The celebrity Pestana is at a party where he has just played, as a special favor to his hostess, his newest hit song “Don’t Kid Me Honey.”

The very latest – published just three weeks earlier, there was no longer a nook or cranny of the city, however remote, where it wasn’t known.  The tune was on everybody’s lips.

“Don’t Kid Me Honey” is a polka.  Pestana writes hit polkas.  Walking home after the party, he finds that last line to be literally true, to his frustration.  Pestana  surrounds his piano with portraits of “Cimarosa, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Bach, Schumann, and three others,” and wants to compose “just one immortal page,” but inspiration never comes.  Or actually it does, frequently:

He began to play something that was his very own, with genuine inspiration: a polka, a frolicsome polka, in the language of the billboards.  No resistance on the part of the composer.

It is the ur-plot for the popular artist, isn’t it?  The bestselling author who wants critical acclaim, the hack painter who wants not just success but respect.  This part of Machado’s story is not so original.  Or perhaps it is, and I am only remembering the mass of later stories on the same theme.

The polka writer marries a consumptive woman hoping that she will be his muse, and an ironic twist or two follows.  She does inspire him, and he composes, in secret, a nocturne for her:

One Sunday, however, he could no longer hold back, and he called his wife to hear him play a passage of the nocturne.  He didn’t tell her what it was or who had composed it.  He stopped suddenly and looked at her questioningly.

“Don’t stop,” said Maria, “it’s Chopin, isn’t it?”

Pestana became pale, stared out into space, repeated one or two passages, and got up.  Maria sat down at the piano and after making an effort to recall it to her memory, executed the piece by Chopin.

That is pretty good, but honestly my favorite parts of this story are the passages about the business of pop songwriting.  Pestana’s publisher is always ready with a title.  The one written in the passage up above, for example, is “Please Keep Your Basket to Yourself, Ma’am.”  It is another smash hit.  Sometimes the titles are political, “The Law of September 28” Or “Bravo for the Timely Election!”  Early on Pestana asks his publisher what the title means and is told “’It doesn’t mean anything, but it’ll become popular right away.’”

Like a good novelty song, a song about something songs are not often about, “The Celebrity” is a fine novelty story.

I found “The Celebrity” in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories.

Cataloguing 40 of at least 60 masterpieces of world literature by Machado de Assis

More of a catalogue than real writing, that is what I will do today.

I mocked (gently, gently) the editor of the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story for his amusingly precise insistence, borrowed from another critic, that “at least sixty [of Machado’s stories] are masterpieces  of world literature” (38).  What amuses me, aside from the vague pedantry, is wondering what the rest of the list would look like.  Chekhov wrote at least 100 masterpieces of world literature; Hemingway wrote at least 40 MoWL; Flannery O’Connor did not write many stories, but at least 20 are MoWL.  I am just guessing at the numbers.  An odd exercise.  Suddenly the world is overflowing with masterpieces.

Not that the general point is wrong.  I have now tracked down all of the short Machado that I can find in English, forty stories if I am counting correctly, almost all from the post-1880 Phase II of Machado’s career, written alongside his five great novels.  It seems like a shame and a mistake that, just to pick a prominent example, the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction does not have a Machado story.  Note to Norton: “Father versus Mother” is the one you want.

Machado’s stories have been translated and collected in three books:

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, tr. William Grossman and others, University of California Press, 1963.

The Devil’s Church and Other Stories, tr. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu, University of Texas Press, 1977.

A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories, tr. John Gledson, Bloomsbury, 2008.

The Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story has three that do not appear in the above, and Words without Borders has two fine Clifford Landers translations online, one of which is the only English version.  I think.  Let me know if I am wrong about any of this.

The three collections are all strong.  The degree of overlap is high and irritating, yet all three books have a number of excellent stories found nowhere else.  The Devil’s Church is an unusually ugly book, with an odd font and pointless clip-art illustrations, but the stories are first-rate.  The title story of The Psychiatrist, more of a mini-novel than a short story, is enough to recommend that collection, but A Chapter of Hats has the most stories, also a recommendation.

I would not be surprised if all sixty MoWL would fit in a single 400 page book, but such a book does not exist.  During Machado’s lifetime these stories were published in five short collections.  A set of translations of those five books is a pleasant thing to imagine, and would be even more pleasant to own.

Machado’s short fiction is surprising in how much it is unlike the novels.  The author’s puzzle-solving and digressive how-fiction-works tomfoolery are reserved for the novels.  The short stories are focused and more directly purposeful.  While the novels are always about the Rio de Janeiro upper class, the stories explore every corner of the city.

I think I will spend the next couple of days looking at a few of them, not to worry about their status as MoWL, but just to enjoy what I found in them.

The attentive reader has four stomachs in his brain - instructions for reading Machado de Assis

For, the attentive, truly ruminative reader has four stomachs in his brain, and through these he passes and repasses the actions and events, until he declares the truth which was, or seemed to be, hidden. (142)

Machado de Assis, and the narrator of Esau and Jacob, seem to have called his attentive readers cows.  Never mind that.  My question is, what truths are at issue here?  What is hidden, and what merely seems to be hidden?

The context of the quotation is that the father of the novel’s heroine has changed political parties for reasons of ambition – his wife’s ambition, specifically.  The mystery, for the narrator, is why the man abandoned his principles so easily; the hidden truth is the role of the wife.  Machado’s novels, with their fractured chronologies and digressions, can superficially resemble puzzle novels – Dom Casmurro­ more than superficially – but the greatest puzzles are those of motive:  why do people do the strange things that they do?  Within the novel, it is Counselor Ayres who is continually working to solve the mysteries, ruminating along with the reader.  In this case, the narrator (also Counselor Ayres) simply tells the reader the “truth”:

Note that I have spared him [me, the reader] Ayres’ work; this time I did not oblige him to find out everything for himself as he has been obliged to do on other occasions. (142)

Then he calls me a cow; I have inverted the quotation.  My point is that the mysteries of Esau and Jacob are not so different than those of Henry James or Marcel Proust, however differently they are presented.

The central mystery of Esau and Jacob is the heroine Flora’s love for the twin brothers of the title.  Does she love Pedro or Paulo or both?  Is there a way to choose between them?

The girls that saw them go by on horseback, along the shore, or up the street, fell in love with that perfect order of form and motion.  Their very horses were exactly alike, almost twins, and beat their hooves in the same rhythm, with the same vigor, with the same grace.  Don’t go imagining that the tossing of their tails and of their manes was simultaneous: it is not true, and might make one doubt the rest.  But the rest is certain. (73)

Neither James nor Proust are likely to scold the reader for extending an image too far.  I usually emphasize, when I am writing about tricky narrators, the bumps and sharp turns in the way they tell the story.  But Machado is clear in Esau and Jacob that the central issue is how we read it.

Esau and Jacob by Machado de Assis - have faith in the narrator of these adventures

Esau and Jacob, 1904, seventh novel  by Machado de Assis, fourth of his amazing late run.  This one, Esau and Jacob is another ingenious masterpiece, although not a particularly welcoming one.  I suspect it requires a bit of commitment to the Machado project.

The obstacle, for me, was a theme that fussed with late nineteenth century Brazilian politics.  Helen Caldwell, the novel’s translator and premier Machado scholar, makes a convincing case that the novel works as an allegory – over here is the soul of Brazil, over there a cluster of symbols of Brazilian monarchism, and on like that.  Oh no no no.  Knowing about this interpretation helps explain some of the flatter parts of the novel, but it is not needed for the hilly and even mountainous passages, so let us never mention it again.

If you want to write the book, here is the pen, here is paper, here is your humble admirer; but, if you only want to read, keep quiet, and go from line to line, I will grant you permission to yawn through a couple of chapters, but wait for the rest, have faith in the narrator of these adventures. (72)

Yes, have faith!  For Esau and Jacob is another of Machado’s brilliantly digressive narrated novels.  As another anonymous narrator explains in a preface that the text in front of me is the seventh manuscript volume of the notebooks of the recently deceased Counselor Ayres.  I know something the contemporary reader would not have known, that Machado’s next and final novel is titled Memorial de Aires (1908).  Most curious.

Counselor Ayres is then the writer and narrator of Esau and Jacob.  He is an omniscient narrator, wandering into any character’s thoughts, prayers, or private moments as he likes.  One character whose thoughts receive particular attention is Counselor Ayres, who functions, as per his diplomatic title, as an adviser to the protagonists of the novel.  Nowhere outside of the preface is there a hint that this same Counselor Ayres is telling the story.  The reader only knows the truth from the preface.

Very clever, having the narrator as a character while never letting on, except that someone else spoils (or enhances) the joke.  Some readers may not be all that interested in cleverness.  Fair enough.  I recommend the earlier Dom Casmurro to their attention, a devilishly clever book, but less merely clever.

Ayres narration is primarily about a pair of young twin brothers who fall for the same woman, the mysterious Flora.  “Mysterious” is Ayres’s word, Ayres the character, not the narrator; the character Ayres is puzzling away at the motives and behavior of Pedro and Paulo and Flora just as the narrator is, perhaps our one clue within the text that they are one and the same.  Flora becomes something of a real character while the twins are part of the book’s flatness, really brought into service only to help create Flora.  At the point where Flora is introduced (the passage I quoted above is about the narrator’s irritation that the reader has likely predicted her existence before he could properly introduce her), I realized that the novel’s title is a red herring – Esau and Jacob did not fight over a woman, no one is going to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage , etc.  And if I have been misdirected by the title, who knows what else has tricked me.

I begin to write about the actual story and characters and find myself back to the cleverness of how the story is told.  That is the kind of novel Esau and Jacob is; those are the novels Machado de Assis wrote.

The pure aesthetic sensation of cruelty - the humane and inhumane Machado de Assis

I want to look at one more Machado de Assis story before setting him aside for a while, another of his at least sixty masterpieces of world literature.  It is Machado’s clearest statement about human cruelty.  No one is in favor of cruelty – no, perhaps Céline and similar authors are in favor of cruelty – but many are indifferent.  The narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) is indifferent, and not just because he is deceased.  Machado can seem indifferent, or even cruel; “The Hidden Cause” is a cruel story.

A young doctor, Garcia, by chance encounters an older man, Fortunato, who has rescued the victim of a random stabbing.  Fortunato assists Garcia in treating the man’s serious wounds.  Garcia is impressed by Fortunato’s fortitude and dedication in the face of danger and pain.  He can tell, though, that something is odd about Fortunato, “that the human heart is a well of mysteries.”

The doctor and Fortunato eventually found a hospital, and the doctor falls in love with Fortunato’s young, beautiful wife – heaven forbid we do not have this plot in a Machado story.  The doctor again observes Fortunato’s unswerving dedication to his patients:

He flinched at nothing; there was no disease too painful or repellent; he was ready for anything, at any time of the day or night.  Everyone was amazed and delighted.  Fortunato studied and followed the operations, and no one else was allowed to apply the caustics.

The story has five pages left, so the title’s “hidden cause” had better appear soon.  It does, in a scene from which I will refrain from quoting.  Detailed, Saw-like torture of a mouse, that is what is in the scene.  I have moved past the ‘orrible bits to get to the point:

Garcia, facing him, managed to control his disgust at the spectacle and observe the man’s expression.  No anger, no hatred; just a vast pleasure, quiet and profound; what you might get from hearing beautiful sonata, or looking at a perfect piece of sculpture – something like a pure aesthetic sensation.

I had better stop, since one more ‘orrible bit follows.  Fortunato’s wife is tubercular, and the story ends with a final demonstration of the hidden cause, one equally horrible but not grisly:

The kiss burst into sobs, the eyes couldn’t hold back the tears, which flowed thick and fast; the tears of silent love and irremediable despair.  Fortunato, at the door, where he had stopped, quietly savoured this explosion of moral pain, which lasted a long, long, deliciously long time.

That last line is, I think, the only point in the story where the point of view fully meshes with that of the sadistic Fortunato.  “Deliciously” is his word.

Machado’s cruel story does not condemn the sadist or argue with him.  It simply exposes him.

I am looking at A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories, translated by John Gledson.  The same story is translated elsewhere as "The Secret Heart."

What a gulf there is between the spirit and the heart! - Machado's pessimism

I would like to write something about the pessimism of Machado de Assis.  I fear I lack the necessary philosophical foundation.  It is easy enough to see that the philosopher in Quincas Borba, creator of the doctrine of Humanitas, is a kook – “To the victor, the potatoes!” is a summary of his beliefs.  It is only slightly harder to do the tiniest bit of research and discover that Machado is satirizing positivism and Auguste Comte, which is pretty much a dead end for me.

The introduction to the Oxford University Press edition (tr. Gregory Rabassa) tells me that Quincas Borba has been interpreted as an allegory of the 1831 to 1889 reign of Emperor Pedro II.  You do not say.  That would be about as fruitful a path for me to pursue as a critique of positivism.  What can I do here.

That line in the title is the first sentence of the single paragraph that is Chapter II.  In Chapter I we learn that Rubião has just inherited a fortune, and that he would not have done so if events had not gone his way:

“See how God writes straight with crooked lines,” he thinks.  “If my sister Piedade had married Quincas Borba it would have left me with only a collateral hope.  She didn’t marry him.  They both died, and here I am with everything, so what looked like misfortune…” (end of Ch. I)

The ellipses are where Rubião’s selfish feelings (“heart”) collides with his guilt (“spirit”) over enjoying the deaths of his sister and friend.   He tries to distract himself by concentrating on a canoe that is floating by – “What a fine canoe!”  But his heart “let itself go on beating with joy.”

Much of Machado’s pessimism or cynicism is little more than a clear-eyed view of human nature.  Rubião is hardly a bad person, at least not the sort of monster Machado would portray in Dom Casmurro, his next novel.  Quincas Borba, with all its variety of characters, may have no bad people, although each character is selfish in his own unique way.  One minor character even approaches selflessness:

In spite of her cousin’s resistance, Dona Fernanda stayed on for Maria Benedita’s convalescence, so cordial, so good, so merry that it was a delight to have her in the house.  The happiness of this place made her forget the unhappiness of the other, but when the new mother was fully recovered, Dona Fernanda turned her attention to the sick man.  (Ch. CXC)

That Dona Fernanda eventually remembers the unhappiness of another is, in Quincas Borba, a moral triumph.  That sick man is Rubião, who does achieve an escape from his egotism, although not in a way anyone would want to imitate.

In the last chapter, the narrator stands at a distance from his text:

Weep for the two recent deaths if you have tears.  If you have only laughter, laugh!  It’s the same thing.  The Southern Cross [invoked early in the novel]… is so high up that it can’t discern the laughter or the tears of men.

Bras Cubas is dead, Dom Casmurro is deluded or even insane, and the narrator of Quincas Borba chooses the point of view of the stars.  From far away, crooked lines look straight.

That’s what you would have seen had you read slowly - Machado insults me

Quincas Borba, the mad Brazilian philosopher, is a secondary character in Machado’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881).  He appears in Machado’s next novel as well, Quincas Borba (1891), although the title may well refer to his dog, also named Quincas Borba (“I will survive in the name of my dog,” Ch. V).

Borba’s philosophy is some sort of extreme version of “everything happens for the best”: “His last words were that pain was an illusion and that Pangloss was not as dotty as Voltaire indicated” (Ch. XI).  What happens in the novel that bears his, or his dog’s, name is that he dies, bequeathing his enormous fortune and his dog to his nurse, a 41 year-old nebbish named Rubião. 

Newly rich, Rubião moves to Rio de Janeiro where he lives in luxury, is fleeced by opportunists, and begins to believe that the dog Quincas Borba actually is the deceased philosopher, or contains his spirit, or something like that, but anyway now talks to him.  He also falls in love with the first woman he meets, who is unfortunately for him married and faithful, more or less.

As with Machado’s other mature novels, Quincas Borba is fragmented: 201 chapters in 267 pages.  Unlike Bras Cubas or Dom Casmurro (1899), this novel is in the third person, with an intrusive narrator, which we all know is the worst of all possible narrators.  Actually, most of the novel is written in a typically Flaubert-like manner, with the point of view centered on a single character at any given point, but hopping around from chapter to chapter, e.g.:

CLXXXVI

“It’s clear to me," Dr. Falcão was thinking on the way out.  “That man was the lover of this fellow’s wife.”

That is an entire chapter, and close to our entire time spent in the thoughts of this character.  Where Machado’s first person novels crush minor characters under the egotism of the narrator, Quincas Borba breathes life into many characters, including, as one might guess, a dog.  The purpose of that interfering narrator, besides joking around, is to break up the ordinary novelistic narrative.  Just as I think the novel is about Rubião’s pathetic pursuit of a married woman, say, Machado shifts somewhere else, to other characters with other problems.

Machado is dismantling the ordinary novelistic story but not replacing it with some clever alternative.  I can read, with satisfaction, for the surprises along the way, but not for the pleasing resolution of all of the little plots.  The reader looking for that will be less pleased.

Chapter CVI is revealing.  Machado has distributed an elaborate set of clues about a couple having a secret love affair, but in these chapters he not only explains the mystery away but insults the reader who fell for it, calling him (me) a “wretch” and refusing to apologize for including the obfuscatory details: “There was no reason for me to cut the episode or interrupt the book.”  Anyway, the real story was perfectly clear: “That’s what you would have seen had you read slowly.”

I read slowly.  Machado is hectoring other readers.

I have gotten nowhere with this novel.  So more tomorrow.  What it all means, maybe.

Machado de Assis, slavery, and slave-catching - not all of them liked being beaten

In the novels of Machado de Assis, or at least the four I have read so far, Brazilian slavery is taken for granted.  I have been startled, at times, by the lack of criticism of slavery.  See the episode in the center of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, for example, where the narrator comes across a man beating a slave in the street, and the violent master turns out to be a slave freed by the narrator!  There is an irony here, but more about human nature than slavery.  Is it relevant that Machado had grandparents who were slaves?

Machado is working on voice and psychology in the novels and his great subject is egotism, not so well suited to social crusading or even to Huckleberry Finn.  His short stories are different, and there is one, “Father versus Mother,” where the tone is a little more critical.  Just a little:

Slavery brought with it its own trades and tools, as happens no doubt with any social institution.  If I mention certain tools, it is only because they are linked to a certain trade.  One of them was the iron collar, another the leg iron.  There was also the mask of tin plate.

That’s the first paragraph of the story.  He sounds like no one so much as Victor Hugo.  Machado spends five more acidic paragraphs on these tools and their purpose:

A half-century ago, slaves ran away frequently.  There were many slaves, and not all of them liked slavery.  It happened sometimes that they were beaten, and not all of them liked being beaten.

The story is about a poor man who makes his living catching runaway slaves, “one of the trades of the time,” in Rio de Janeiro.  He marries when times are good, but his wife is pregnant when times are bad.  Perhaps the couple will have to “carry the child that was soon to be born to the Wheel of abandoned babies.”

Machado squeezes  as hard as he can.  The father, the slave catcher, gets a hot lead on a high-reward runaway while carrying his baby to the foundling hospital.  The runaway slave is, he finds, pregnant.  Thus, the cruel dilemma – which baby to save? – except that there is no dilemma, even as the story takes a worse turn.  The slave catcher saves his own baby; the slave catcher catches the slave.  That’s that.  What else did I expect?

Again, it would be strange, out of place, to hear the self-absorbed narrators of Machado's novels worry much about justice or abolitionism.  But those narrators are not Machado.

 “Father versus Mother” led Machado’s 1906 short story collection, but was presumably also published earlier.  Quotations are from the Helen Caldwell translation, available in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories and Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story.  Another version is in A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories.

We know absolutely nothing of the texts we gnaw - more gnawing on Dom Casmurro

More Machado de Assis and Dom Casmurro.

1.  What I would like to do, but cannot, is map out my Crazy Theory about Dom Casmurro, which would resolve the multiple layers of the novel into a single ingenious solution.  Having read the novel once and browsed through it, I do not have more than the barest beginning or first scraps of evidence for my idea.  It will have to wait for a re-read.

In brief:  Our unreliable narrator destroys his happy family life because of his unreasonable jealousy.  But if Dom Casmurro is a combination of Othello (an admitted association) and Iago (a hidden one), then things frankly go too well for everyone.  A common interpretation is that the novel parodies tragedy, but I wonder if it actually conceals tragedy. Next time through.

2.  The unreliable narrator game works only if the novelist imposes some sort of limits on the unreliability.  If everything is in doubt, the novel crumbles.  The fictional writer cannot simply lie, but must also provide some way for the canny reader to identify the lies.  Thus, the need for a narrator who lacks control over his narrative, who is insane or boastful  or weakly self-deluded.  My Crazy Theory really demands an insane narrator.

3.  Jenny, at Shelf Love, works on the problem, the most difficult question in the novel: who is the person at the center of the novel?  He is “a tight-lipped man who doesn’t tell stories” (his “Casmurro” nickname means something like “taciturn”), but here he is telling stories for 260 pages.  She points to a place where the narrator himself tells me that my job is to “fill in the missing middle” (Ch. 55).

4.  Jenny picks out another good example of Machado’s rule-making.  Casmurro and Capitú’s son Ezekiel looks suspiciously like Casmurro’s best friend, Capitú’s presumed lover.  Or does he?  Casmurro insists that he does, that this resemblance is the strongest justification for his jealousy and subsequent actions.  But chance resemblances are a recurring theme of the novel – does the narrator understand this himself?  Is it an unconscious suggestion of his doubts?  A perverse form of proof?  Does the resemblance between son of friend exist or not, and how can we decide if all we have is the narrator’s version of the story?  Another odd Nabokov correspondence here: see Despair (1936).

5.  What other puzzles do I need to solve, or play with, when I next read Dom Casmurro?  A friend of the narrator writes a Panegyric to Saint Monica that baffles me.  The symbolic role of a child who is killed by his leprosy sticks out too much for my comfort.  And what about the worms?

I went so far as to pick up old books, dead books, buried books, open them, compare them, in order to track down the text and the meaning…  I tracked down the very worms in the books that they might tell me what was in the texts they gnawed.

“My dear sir,” replied a long fat worm, “we know absolutely nothing of the texts we gnaw, nor do we choose what we gnaw, nor do we like or dislike what we gnaw: we gnaw.” (Ch. 17)

That’s what I will do next time: track down the worms and watch them gnaw, and maybe even gnaw on the book alongside the worms.

One was within the other, like the fruit within its rind - layers of Dom Casmurro

Two stories in Dom Casmurro, surface and subsurface.  Bento Santiago, a lawyer who lives in an exact duplicate of his childhood home, decides to write the story of his life with his teen sweetheart and later wife Capitú, the most important female of the Brazilian literature.  This story turns into two stories, at least.

1. Despite early love and promises of devotion, Capitú has an affair with Bento’s best friend Escobar, and Capitú’s son Ezekiel is from Escobar.  The memoir is actually the prosecutor’s case against Capitú, a presentation of the evidence of the affair.

I see that I have already violated my schema.  The novel has branched.  The memoir of Bento (story 1) is also the proof of Capitú’s guilt (story 2).  This branch is visible in the structure of the novel, which, after an introduction, consists of a relatively straightforward and even sweet 100 pages of thwarted true love, and then another 100 pages of Bento's escape from the priesthood into marriage, leaving only 60 pages for marriage, children, death, betrayal, and that sort of thing.  It is during this last section that it becomes clear that what started as one kind of story has turned into something else, even if Bento claims otherwise:

If you remember of Capitú the child, you will have to recognize that one was within the other, like the fruit within its rind. (Ch. 148)

This is from the last page of the novel.  The narrator recognizes the problem, it seems, and insists that there is no branch at all, or if there is it is “the result of some chance incident.”

3.  The evidence for Capitú’s guilt, is, it turns out, thin.  Perhaps she did not have an affair at all, and Ezekiel is, in fact, Bento’s child, and he ruins everyone’s lives solely because of his jealousy and paranoia.  Bento’s case against Capitú is actually the case for, or the case against himself.

References to Othello run through the novel – explicit ones, like Chapter 135, “Othello” – and Bento identifies himself with Shakespeare’s character, although he perversely recognizes that if he is right the role does not fit, since Desdemona is not guilty.  He misreads Othello just a bit:

“And she [Desdemona] was innocent!”  I kept saying to myself all the way down the street.  “What would the audience do if she were really guilty, as guilty as Capitú?  And what death would the Moor mete out to her then?  A bolster would not suffice; there would be need of blood and fire, a vast, intense fire to consume her wholly, and reduce her to dust, and the dust tossed to the wind, in eternal extinction…” (Ch. 135, ellipses in original)

Bento no longer sounds like Othello at all, but like his namesake Iago, barely mentioned in Dom Casmurro aside from Bento’s last name. Strictly speaking, the reader, entirely dependent of the enclosed world of a narrator who may well be insane, has no certain way to judge the behind-the-scenes events of the novel.  The contradictory stories coexist.  The one in fact implies the other.

4.  More branches.  Bento writes his memoir to convince whom of Capitú’s adultery (himself, maybe, to assuage his guilt)?  Or is Bento’s guilt entirely in his subconscious, repressed, leaking into his text without his knowledge?  Is the memoir a prosecution, or a confession?  I detect hints of another possibility, too.  What if Bento is concealing something worse?

Well, when Brazilians complain that the English-speaking world undervalues their greatest novel, this is why.  It is a deconstructionist masterpiece, a text which casts a shadow more real than the text itself; the shadow may in turn have its own shadow; the novel is the aggregation of the text and all of the implied shadow stories.  The book is packed with uncanny echoes of The Good Soldier (Ford did not know Machado), Pale Fire (Nabokov never read Machado), and Borges (who read Machado long after he, Borges, had written his central works).  (Or so I understand all of this).

You will see that I have borrowed and rewritten much of Jenny’s piece from yesterday.

I am also reading Helen Caldwell’s translation, by the way.

I have never quite understood a conversation... - "Midnight Mass," the greatest story, or so I am told, of Machado de Assis

The Machado de Assis book I want to get to is his 1899 novel Dom Casmurro, which Jenny at Shelf Love describes here (brief response to Jenny: Yes!).  I am going to continue my Machado-like indirect approach, though, and puzzle over another short story, the 1894 “Midnight Mass.”  Jenny and other readers of Dom Casmurro will see the relevance.

The first paragraph:

I have never quite understood a conversation that I had with a lady many years ago, when I was seventeen and she was thirty.  It was Christmas Eve.  I had arranged to go to Mass with a neighbor and was to rouse him at midnight for this purpose.

The first phrase is itself classic Machado.  The entire seven page story is the narrator trying to understand that conversation.  Was his landlady, Conceição, in the couple of hours before midnight, trying to seduce him?  Or did the timid seventeen year old just wish that she were?  Was he perhaps just detecting signs of Conceição’s frustration with her husband, who is at a liaison with a married woman, or her longing for someone else with whom she is in love?  Is she knowing or innocent; are her desires active, or unconscious (“I didn’t understand her denial; perhaps she didn’t understand it either”)?

The narrator’s response to Conceição is convincingly adolescent; he is all too conscious of her physical presence:

From time to time she wet her lips with her tongue.

Although thin, she always walked with a certain rocking gait as if she carried her weight with difficulty.  I had never before felt this impression so strongly.

She took the ends of her belt and tapped them on her knees, or rather on her right knee, for she had crossed her legs.

The idyll or seduction is interrupted by the neighbor on his way to Mass.  Conceição’ final words are:

“Hurry, hurry, don’t make him wait.  It was my fault.  Goodbye until tomorrow.”

Her fault that she kept the narrator from his appointment?  Or her fault that she was too passive, that she did not make the first move?  Or is she even talking to the narrator at that moment?

The narrator, by the end of the story, has no idea, nor does the reader.  Machado’s strategy is to multiply possible interpretations.  Some of the possibilities I mentioned above do not become visible until the last sentence.

“Midnight Mass” is often picked as Machado’s greatest story.  Or so says the editor of the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story, although, amusingly, he omits it from his collection, perhaps because it was already included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997).  I read “Midnight Mass” in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories; William Grossman translated.

Notes on Machado de Assis using his characteristic form

I. No more than 37 pages into Quincas Borba, the 1891 Machado de Assis novel, I have no idea what the story might be.  A schoolteacher inherits a fortunes and a dog from a mad philosopher, whose great saying is “TO THE VICTOR, THE POTATOES” (Ch. XVIII).  The teacher is the victor, and thus he gets the potatoes, although I wonder about the dog.  An earlier translation of the book is in fact titled Philosopher or Dog?  Both philosopher and dog are names Quincas Borba.  I guess this setup could go anywhere.

II.  The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) could go anywhere, and does, while also going nowhere.  Thinking over the story, I am surprised to recall how little there is.  A man of leisure has a long-term affair with a married woman which eventually fizzles.  He has other ambitions which also fizzle.  Eventually, he dies, after which he composes his memoirs.  How is that a novel?

III.  The story of Dom Casmurro (1899) is more substantially novelistic.  A teenage boy, Bentinho, does not want to go to the seminary, and does not want to become a priest.  He is in love with the girl next door, the startling and original Capitú; she, for some reason, loves him, too.  They scheme to keep Bentinho at home.  Aside from some peculiar digressions by the narrator, the adult Bentinho, and the knowledge, from the early chapters, that something separates the lovers, the novel is almost a conventional love story.  That lasts for about a hundred pages.  Then the novel spins off into the void, but slowly, sneakily.

IV.  Although I would not guess it from the novels, Machado de Assis was full of stories.  He published over 200 of them among which – I have opened the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006) to Machado’s biography on page 37 – he “exhibits a polished, concise, and masterful style in sixty-three stories.”  In fact, “at least sixty are masterpieces of world literature.”   I greatly admire the confidence and precision of the biographer’s judgment.

V.  It would be useful, certainly, if someone would translate and publish Machado’s final five volumes of short stories, home of the 63 world-class masterpieces, in their original format and order.  Maybe half of them have wandered into English elsewhere, in three short collections, in this anthology, and in the little 1921 volume I wrote about here.  That means I am missing out on at least thirty masterpieces!  Of world literature!

VI.  In 480 pages of stories, the Oxford Anthology gives 63 (10 stories) to Machado de Assis.  Next is the linguistic innovator João Guimarães Rosa (56 pages, 6 stories), then the mysteriously symbolic Clarice Lispector (37 and 9).  Érico Veríssimo, father of the author of Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, has three stories in 27 pages; no one else has more than two stories.  The anthologist admits that this distribution slights Jorge Amado “who never specialized in the story per se.”   So that’s Brazilian literature from one angle.

VII.  I guess I will spend the next week or two pawing through Machado de Assis, although not in this irritating format.  I believe one more reader will join me.  Outstanding.

Both theory and practice - The Psychiatrist by Machado de Assis

Wuthering Expectations will be closed for the holiday on Thursday and Friday.  Next week, if all goes well, I will balance my Eça de Queirós obsession with some Machado de Assis.  Exact contemporaries, careful readers of each other’s work – Eça actually rewrote an entire novel because of Machado’s criticisms – they could hardly be more different.

A preview today, Machado’s novella The Psychiatrist (1881-2), a prescient satire of the new profession and of social science in general.  I read it in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (1963); William L. Grossman translated.

A famous psychiatrist, “one of the greatest doctors in all Brazil, Portugal, and the Spains,” returns to his obscure home town to conduct his researches, marries, and opens a mental asylum, although to many citizens “[t]he idea of having madmen live together in the same house seemed itself to be a symptom of madness” (3).  Dr. Bacamarte’s reasons for choosing his wife (“neither beautiful nor charming”) tells us exactly who he is:

The doctor replied that Dona Evarista enjoyed perfect digestion, excellent eyesight, and normal blood pressure; she had had no serious illnesses and her urinalysis was negative.  It was likely she would give him healthy, robust children… he would not be tempted to sacrifice his scientific pursuits to the contemplation of his wife’s attractions.” (1)

After the first surprisingly large “torrent of madmen,” Dr. Bacamarte’s theories evolve, and the definition of insanity expands.  A revolutionary political plot develops, opposed to the coercive madhouse, at least until it takes power and the madhouse becomes a useful tool for enforcing the junta’s power.

Soon enough, eighty percent of the town’s population are in the asylum, which leads the psychiatrist to again revise his theories: because, statistically, insanity is the norm, the insane must therefore be sane, and the sane insane.  The eighty percent are released; members of the bizarrely “mentally well balanced” twenty percent are put in the madhouse.  Soon the asylum is full of the town’s most unusual inhabitants: the modest, the truthful, the wise.

Can you guess how the story ends?

“This is a matter of science, of a new doctrine,” he said, “and I am the first instance of its application.  I embody both theory and practice.”  (44)

Machado’s story zips through many of the next century’s critiques of psychiatry, from the shaky authority of the psychiatrist to the abuse of the field by totalitarians, all of this pre-Freud.  His novels, first person and digressive, are quite different.  The Psychiatrist is focused, fierce and purposeful.

Some Brazilian Tales, useful and otherwise

A neat little discovery by mel u of The Reading Life: the 1921 Brazilian Tales, a pocket collection of six curious-to-good short stories.  The link goes to Google Books, where the PDF scan is available; mel has links to the Gutenberg version.  The book has three stories by the great Machado de Assis and three stories by writers new to me (these links go to mel's posts):

“The Vengeance of Felix” by José de Medeiros e Albuquerque, a rough tale of rough folk and rough revenge.
“The Pigeons” by Coelho Netto, terribly sad, a father’s angry response to the death of his child.
“Aunt Zeze’s Tears” by Carmen Dolores, also sad, in which an old maid gets her hopes up.

Hey, look at that, a woman writer!  You won’t find any of them on the lists I made for the Portuguese Challenge, because I did not know of any.

Netto’s story is about indigenous laborers; the Medeiros e Albuquerque story is about urban working class characters.  The description of the title character has a lot of energy:

Old Felix had followed his trade of digger in all the quarries that Rio de Janeiro possessed.  He was a sort of Hercules with huge limbs, but otherwise stupid as a post.  His companions had nicknamed him Hardhead because of his obstinate character. (opening lines)

I rarely emphasize the point, but these good post-Maupassant short stories have another use for me:  they fill in some more of the background of turn of the century Brazil.  What was life like there, what were people like?  This is fiction, so watch your step, but maybe something like what these writers show me.  For this purpose they are more useful than the stories of the more original writer, Machado de Assis.

“The Attendant’s Confession” is by the Machado de Assis I recognize, a cynical, dodging and weaving first-person story.  A murderous act of anger is rewarded.  The narrator is confessing to the murder, but why – and when?  Similarly, “The Fortune-Teller” is as much concerned with its own structure as the world outside the story.  And then there is “Life,” a hallucinatory dialogue between the Wandering Jew and Prometheus about the value of life and mankind which I did not really get, at least not until the punchline.

None of these Machado de Assis stories are in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, the one collection I have read, but they may well be in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories or A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories.  I am amazed that there are three collections of Machado de Assis stories in English.

A good find by mel – thanks for that.

But I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless blog post - Machado de Assis at his best

No, I need to compensate for the dud.  I am not exactly reading but thumbing through The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), the first of Machado de Assis’s mature novels, the novel where the author severed himself from his earlier work and created something distinctively his own.  Something like this:

CXXXVI

Uselessness

But I’m either mistaken or I’ve just written a useless chapter.

That is the entirety of chapter 136.  I will bet that for many readers, this chapter by itself is either a recommendation for the book, to see how this kind of writing works, or a clear warning to avoid Machado de Assis.

“Uselessness” is the only single sentence chapter in the novel, if I count this as more than one sentence:

CXXXIX

How I Didn’t Get to Be Minister of States

……………………….
……………………….
……………………….

The narrator of the novel, the author of the memoir, is recently deceased, dead at sixty-four of pneumonia, as he tells me in the first chapter.  In the hands of almost any other writer, the mechanics and curiosities of posthumous authorship would occupy some substantial part of the book, allowing the real author to demonstrate his imaginative chops, but Machado de Assis does nothing of the sort, provides no glimpses of the afterlife or gags about publishing in heaven.

The posthumous gimmick solves a couple of technical problems.  First, the memoirist can complete his story, all the way to his death.  Second, he is freed from worry about what anyone else might think of his life.  Machado de Assis wants a reliable narrator, one who may have trouble understanding himself, but otherwise has nothing to hide.

The narrator is also free to wander, double back, digress and regress, but I do not believe he needs to be dead to do that.  He cites the “free-form” of 18th century writers Laurence Sterne and Xavier de Maistre as models.  Chapter titles include “What Aristotle Left Out,” “The Author Hesitates,” and “The Defect of This Book,” yet a story is told, a surprisingly ordinary one.  Girl trouble, mostly.  The telling of the story is the extraordinary thing.

In the novel’s fictional preface, Brás Cubas calls his book “playful” and “melancholy” and suspects that it will have about five readers.  But he does not mean to be obscure or unfriendly:

The work itself is everything: if it pleases you, dear reader, I shall be well paid for the task; if it doesn’t please you, I’ll pay you with a snap of the finger and goodbye.

I had thought that I was just browsing the novel, but I seem to be reading it again.

I am using the Oxford University Press edition, translated by Gregory Rabassa.

Helena, a Machado de Assis dud - Do not blame me for anything romantic you may find in it

After my enthusiastic praise for Eça de Queirós I should, for justice or symmetry, devote some equally effusive time to his Brazilian contemporary Machado de Assis.  Unfortunately the last Machado de Assis novel I read is a – what is the technical term? – a dud.  An instructive dud, though.

No one will dropping by here will read Helena (1876) so I can summarize the plot with abandon.  A half-brother and half-sister, Helena, are reunited as young adults.  They are both attractive, so an attentive reader might guess the path of the story right here.  Even I, the Naïve Reader, noticed that an incest plot was on its way, that the siblings had fallen in love.

But no, in a twist we discover that noble Helena and her brother are not related at all!  They can marry and be happy, except that they are both engaged to other people by now, and Helena is just too good for the world, so in the final five pages she has to stay out too long in the rain, and catch a fever, and die (“her soul burst its delicate earthly sheath” 196).  I was a’feared of that.

That story is not so bad – no, not until the very end, at least.  It is the plainness of the writing, the lack of much out of the ordinary that makes the book dull.  Still, the treatment of the secondary characters has some life, a little sign of the more stinging novels to come, and a priest character is used in a peculiar manner that may be uniquely Brazilian.  The casual treatment of the subject of slavery is so different from what I know from U. S. literature and is interesting for that reason alone.  Subjects to keep in reserve.

I am amazed that the writer of Helena is also the author of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, published only five years later.  The change in style, voice, and method is radical.  I don’t know another case like it, an example where a mature writer makes such an extreme change.  Machado de Assis added a foreword to the 1905 edition of his 1876 Helena to explain himself a bit:

Do not blame me for anything romantic you may find in it… Even now that I have long since gone on to other works, of a different style, I hear a faraway echo on rereading these pages, an echo of youth and ingenuous faith.

I do not blame him.  No, I understand, completely.  But if Portuguese Reading Challengers will stick with the books of the later astringent Machado de Assis and skip the early Romantic ones, that would be appreciated.  One was sufficient.

The translation of Helena is by the Machado de Assis scholar Helen Caldwell.

The Wuthering Expectations Year in Review

The most important statistic first, Number of Books Read: 107, assuming I finish Vanity Fair soon. 107! Awesome! What's that? Is one of these books basically two pages long? Yes, what's your point? No, no, no, it totally counts.

So one thing that happened this year was that I read shorter books than usual. Really short, hundred pagers, or poetry collections that, if stripped of white space, might be fifty pages. One reason was the trip to Senegal. For a variety of reasons, including some constraints of West African publishing, many of the most famous Senegalese books are very short.

Another reason was the sudden, surprise trip to Tokyo. In that case, I deliberately selected short books.

A final reason was that it's simply a myth that the 19th century is particularly characterized by long books.

I hope that was the final reason. Another possibility is that I read short books in order to have something to write about. I hope not. I just started The Count of Monte Cristo for balance.

What does length mean, anyway? The Hardest Book of the Year was a very short one, Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, recommended by some well-meaning, I assume, commenters. My poor head, my poor head, it trembles yet.

Best Book of the Year: Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, the Greatest Novel of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. I state that opinion with great confidence - not confidence that anyone will agree with me, but that I am unlikely to change my mind. Vanity Fair, which I love, probably won't quite make it that far. This is a bet a fellow wants to lose, so I hope that Dombey and Son or Mary Barton or The Count of Monte Cristo really knock me out. But I have my doubts.

De-Humiliations: Meaning, famous books that I read for the first time. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Theodor Storm's Immensee. I should point out that although I enjoy this game, I do not actually find it humiliating that I have not read whatever books I haven't read, even if those books are Middlemarch, Walden, or Les Miserables. I mean, I want to read them, but the Amateur Reader does not, and should not, actually feel bad that he hasn't. Maybe I should also count Adam Bede as a de-Humiliation, since I had never read George Eliot before.

More Favorites: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet; Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider; Prosper Mérimée, Colomba; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas; Aminata Sow Fall, The Beggars' Strike; Ousmane Sèmbene, God's Bits of Wood; Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful". Theodor Storm's stories were generally very impressive.

Robert Browning, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics; One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth; a 17th century obscurity called Hamlet (thanks, Nigel!)

Christpher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan ; Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang; Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol.

The mention of Machado de Assis reminds me of a special category, Worst Editing I Saw All Year: Oxford University Press, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis. I read the 1996 first edition, the flagship title in their Library of Latin American Literature.

There was a major editing error every three pages or so. Some were like "now\know", some were like "hedl\held". They were spread through the entire novel. My favorite howler was in the introduction, where the novel is compared to Erasmus's In Praise of Polly, twice on the same page. Now, I would love to read that book, presumably an ode to Erasmus's favorite parrot, but it unfortunately does not exist. Late in the novel, the narrator mentions In Prasie of Folly, suggesting that the editor of the introduction did not read the actual novel too carefully.

Well, it was only a major English edition of the greatest Brazilian novel. Why knock yourself out.

Anyway, what a lot of good books.

Next: next.