About the Author:
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the descendent of African slaves, is considered one of the greatest Latin American authors of the last century. His novels include The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, and Dom Casmurro. Dain Borges is a Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and is author of The Family in Bahia. Carlos Felipe Moisés is a Brazilian poet and literary critic. Elizabeth Lowe is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature. She lives in Gainesville, FL.
From Publishers Weekly:
Like Balzac's Human Comedy, Machado de Assis's major novels provide readers with a social physiognomyAa map of surface phenomena that indicate deeper cultural meaning. This novel, written in 1904, harks back to the waning years of Brazil's monarchy, in the 1880s. Natividade and Augostinho Santos are upper-class Brazilians living in Rio de Janeiro. When Natividade gives birth to twins, she succumbs to "plebian" superstition by anonymously visiting an Indian fortune-teller who hints that her twins fought in the womb. Even after birth, the brothers are continually in conflict. Pedro is a legitimist, who hangs a portrait of Louis XVI over his bed; Paulo is a radical, hanging a picture of Robespierre over his. Their status as adversaries is cemented by their dueling courtship of one girl: Flora Batista. While Flora's parents try to anticipate the events that will transform Brazil from a kingdom to a republic, Flora puzzles over her choice of lovers. Her indecision leads her first into hallucination and finally into death. In Machado's novels, the characters' observations of the plot are as important as the plot itself. The observers here are Natividade, who notices the hostility between her sons, and Counselor Aires, a retired diplomat who records his thoughts in a series of notebooks. Disguising his contrarian viewpoints in baroque compliments, Aires positions himself as a detached psychologist, searching for the truths of temperament beneath ephemeral conflicts of opinion. Machado is both a first-rate humorist and a prescient experimenter with narrative convention. This fresh translation, sponsored by the Library of Latin America, will hopefully attract new readers to one of the great 19th-century novelists. (Oct.) FYI: Esau and Jacob is edited, with a foreword and notes, by Dain Borges, and includes an afterword by Carlos Felipe Mois?s.
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