One of the precursors to the modern novel: Machado's Bras Cubas

 When last I posted on Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (aka Machado) about a year ago I speculated that he may have been influenced by Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but I wondered how much exposure he would have had to European literature. Machado, whose father was a black man descended from emancipated slaves, is today considered one of the great American black writers of the 19th century - though "American" in this case is South American, Brazilian in fact. Having just finished reading Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) I learned from the editors' notes that Machado was widely read in many languages and noted himself the influence Sterne had on his work: A confessional narrator, often directly addressing the reader, and a style replete with many comments and insights about the task of writing itself, a self-edited memoir, in which the narrator suggests skipping several chapters (there are about 150 chapters, none longer than 2 pp. - very readable!), in short a precursor of modern (i.e., 20th-century) fiction. In these notes written from the grave the narrator tells his life story, brought up in comfort, falls in love with a young woman from another class, the relationship broken off by his imperious father, and what follows is a lifelong search for love - which he does find in a long and circuitous affair w/ the wife of one of his so-called friends and political allies, but attempts to match him up for matrimony all fail. Late in life he comes across his youthful love and finds her to be a ruin, even her beauty decomposed - and this is perhaps an echo of Sentimental Education, one of the greatest of all 19th-century novels. As the editors/translators, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, note, Machado show no sympathy whatsoever for Brazilian slaves or their descendants; his narrator accepts all the privileges and prejudices of his class - though perhaps that's not so strange. Machado was no proselytizer. Best to accept him for what is rather than reject him for what he is not: He is an inventive novelist and an acute observer of the mores of his social class, something always best seen and noted, I think, by one on the outside looking in.