Where to Buy
Affiliate links coming soon. Purchases will help support this project.
Read / Listen Free
Collected Works
8.5Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro / Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas)
Machado de Assis — Brazil's greatest novelist and a postmodernist a century before postmodernism, whose Dom Casmurro and Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas are unmatched in Latin American fiction.
GBM Assessment (Score: 8.5/10)
The collected works of Machado de Assis — most notably Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas — represent the achievement of the greatest Latin American novelist before the Boom generation, a writer who was astonishingly postmodern before postmodernism existed. Often called the "Brazilian Shakespeare," Machado de Assis employed unreliable narration, metafictional self-awareness, and darkly ironic humor decades before these techniques became hallmarks of twentieth-century experimental fiction.
Writing in Brazil during the transition from Empire to Republic, Machado de Assis explored themes of slavery, social climbing, and self-deception with a sophistication that anticipated stream-of-consciousness narration and the unreliable narrator techniques later associated with modernism. His works constitute the foundation of Brazilian literature and have gained increasing international recognition as a remarkable bodies of fiction produced in the nineteenth century.
Russia, Brazil & America, 1880-1881
Dostoevsky publishes The Brothers Karamazov and dies January 1881. Tsar Alexander II is assassinated by revolutionaries in March. Machado de Assis in Brazil writes with an irony that anticipates modernism by decades. Henry James publishes The Portrait of a Lady, pioneering the psychological novel and point-of-view technique. The Gilded Age in America; the late Victorian era in Britain. Three literary traditions are simultaneously reaching new heights of psychological depth.
Awards & Adaptations
'Brazilian Shakespeare.' Foundation of Brazilian literature.
Recommended Edition
First eds. (1881/1899)
