“Everything that occurred in thirty years, some Balzac or other could put into three hundred pages; why then not life, which was Balzac’s teacher, squeeze it into thirty or sixty minutes?”
The Looking-Glass from Brazilian author Machado de Assis is one title in Pushkin Press’s Essential Stories editions. Here are the contents:
The Fortune-Teller
The Posthumous Portrait Library
The Loan
The Tale of the Cabriolet
The Stick
The Secret Cause
The Canon or the Metaphysics of Style
The Alienist
The Looking-Glass
Midnight Mass
I won’t review all the stories (they are mostly quite short, but instead I will mention my favourites:
In the Posthumous Portrait Library, the death of Joaquim Fidélis devastates his circle of friends. He was sixty, “strong, in cast-iron health, and he had been to a dance on the very night before.” He even danced with the widow of a friend. When Fidélis returned home, he makes an entry about the dance in a notebooks: “In short, a frightful evening; some long-in-the-tooth reveller forced me to dance a quadrille with her.” While the notebooks show Fidélis’s true thoughts, these nasty mean-spirited barbs remain hidden inside his desk. No one has any idea that Fidélis, with his “beautiful manners,” a man who is able to seamlessly adapt himself to his company presenting a façade of pleasantry to the world in fact loathes everyone around him. Fidélis, unmarried, leaves his estate to his nephew Benjamin. The funeral for Fidélis is well-attended, and some time later Benjamin discovers the notebooks and their snarky contents. …
In The Loan, a man called Custódio asks a notary for a loan. I loved the description of Custódio:
This Custódio had been born with a vocation for wealth, but with no vocation for work. He had an instinct for elegance, a love of excess, of good food, of beautiful ladies, of fine carpets, of precious furniture, a voluptuary and, to some degree, an artist, capable of managing the Vila Torlonia or the gallery at the Hamilton Palace. But he had no money; neither money nor any aptitude or inclination for earning it.
[…]
He had an excellent nose for calamities. Of twenty companies, he immediately guessed which one was the purest filly, and applied himself to that, with great determination. Ill-fortune, which pursued him, made the nineteen prosper, while the twentieth blew up in his hands.
And ever true to his nature, Custódio seeks a loan for yet another business venture. …
In Midnight Mass the narrator recalls a conversation that took place many years earlier. The narrator was 17 and staying in the home of a middle-aged notary, a relation by marriage. The notary supposedly goes to the theatre once a week, but in reality he maintains a relationship with another woman. The notary’s wife has learned to tolerate the affair. To the narrator, the notary’s wife seems ordinary. Boring. And then one night circumstances lead the narrator and the wife to exchange confidences. I liked this story for the way it showed how little we know people–those who seem ordinary may have an intricate inner life. Or they may not.
translated by Daniel Hahn.
Review copy
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