Customer Reviews

O Alienista (Classicos Da Literatura Brasileira) (Portuguese Edition)

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Machado de Assis is one of the best know of Brasil's ample stable of fiction writers and certainly one of the most talented. This book is set in a fictional community where everyone needs the doctor's help for their mental illness....perhaps this was Saramago's inspiration for Blindness? This dystopia, however, is more cerebral than earthy, though its plague is just as debilitating. This man is a master of painting the character in a paragraph and it is a joy to observe in O Alienista!

Many regard Machado de Assis as the greatest Brazilian writer of fiction, especially for his novels. Although he was writing in the late 19th Century and early years of the 20th, his works' stylistic and structural experimentation makes some of them, such as « Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas » ("Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas," a/k/a "Epitaph of a Small Winner"), feel more like they were written in the 1960s or later.

In the case of « O Alienista », on the other hand, style and structure seem very rooted in the 19th Century (the novella was first published in 1882). But it's the plot that has contemporary relevance. It concerns a learned doctor whose expandable concept of insanity leads him to lock up more and more of his town's populace in a private asylum, usually with the acquiescence of the town's people and government. Though obviously not the kind of story that literally could happen today, I was struck by how much it resonated with some very modern techniques for marginalizing political dissent and other forms of deviance. As in all of Machado's major writings, the author's dead-on satirical skills are always in evidence: there is black humor from start to finish. Though you might need a medium-sized dictionary for a couple of words, rather than a pocket one, in general the Portuguese is not so difficult -- no need to be 100% fluent before you give this a try.

Machado's best work,to my view.A doctor wants to cure all mental ills and,in trying to do so,he himself ends up crazy.Does exist a definite line between sanity and insanity?