Essential to students of Latin American and world literature.
A welcome omnibus edition of short fiction by the writer widely considered the greatest to have come out of Brazil.
The grandson of freed mixed-race slaves on his father’s side and son of a white Azorean mother, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was a largely self-taught writer who worked in several genres, including drama and poetry, and much of whose prodigious output is not well-known outside his native Brazil. His stories are not always accurate gauges of what scholar Michael Wood calls “his evolution from a poorly educated child of impoverished parents to Brazil’s greatest writer and pillar of the establishment,” inasmuch as his stories, most of them set in Rio de Janeiro, are more the stuff of drawing rooms than favelas. This edition, comprising all seven collections published in Machado de Assis’ lifetime and including a dozen stories that have never before been translated into English, stands as a primary firsthand literary portrait of Brazil in its age of empire and especially of a city that was on its way from being a tropical backwater to its reinvention as a grand imperial metropolis. Close readers of Latin American literature will note in many of his stories early stirrings of magical realism, especially in their evocation of a musty past of nobles and antique surroundings: “Naturally, the mirror was very old, but you could still see the gilding, eaten away by time, a couple of carved dolphins in the top corners of the frame, a few bits of mother-of-pearl, and other such artistic flourishes.” Sometimes Machado de Assis reads like a European modernist (“On that day—sometime around 2222, I imagine—the paradox will take off its wings and put on the thick coat of common truth”), at others like the contemporary of Melville and Flaubert that he was (“I succumbed to the morbid pleasure of tormenting myself, for no good reason”). In whatever regard, this collection offers plenty of evidence for why he enjoys the reputation he does, a pioneer of moods and modes that include fables, thin satires, and even gothic romances.
Essential to students of Latin American and world literature.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-496-1
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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