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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Originally published in 1904, this novel by Brazil's greatest writer appears as part of Oxford's Library of Latin Writers. Presented as the final notebook by urbane diplomat Aires, the novel spans the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a tumultuous period in the history of Brazil, and focuses on a pair of twins and their enchantment with the same woman. A fortuneteller in Rio de Janeiro predicts great things for one-year-old Pedro and Paulo, and their mother expects no less, despite their differing philosophies and recurring conflicts. When lovely Flora is unable to choose between the two of them, she seeks the counsel of Aires but eventually departs the scene in a manner typical of a fictional Victorian maiden. This mannered, leisurely view of the human condition as seen through members of a particular privileged class has been analyzed by critics for decades for its layers of allegory, allusion, and symbolism and its narrative form. Now students have a renewed opportunity to study this novel and readers to enjoy it, on whatever level. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
