Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, trans. by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
RaveThe New YorkerWit leaps centuries and hemispheres. It does not collect dust, and, when done right, it does not age. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, is a case in point. Long forgotten by most, it’s one of the wittiest, most playful, and therefore most alive and ageless books ever written. It is a love story—many love stories, really—and it’s a comedy of class and manners and ego, and it’s a reflection on a nation and a time, and an unflinching look at mortality, and all the while it’s an intimate and ecstatic exploration of storytelling itself. It is a glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read, but, for no good reason at all, almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it ... But it survives, and must be read, for the music of its prose and, more than anything else, for its formal playfulness. A new translation, by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, is a glorious gift to the world, because it sparkles, because it sings, because it’s very funny and manages to capture Machado’s inimitable tone, at once mordant and wistful, self-lacerating and romantic ... This is an atheistic book, where there is no judge but one’s conscience, and where the offender lies alone, in a box permeated by worms, recounting his life and failures without any heavenly consequence. It’s funny, too. It is wholly original and unlike anything other than the many books that came after it and seem to have knowingly or not borrowed from it.
David Mitchell
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewThis new book is a straight-up, linear, third-person historical novel, an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of a rescue tale — all taking place off the coast of Japan, circa 1799. Postmodern it’s not … This is a book about many things: about the vagaries and mysteries of cross-cultural love; about faith versus science; about the relative merits of a closed society versus one open to ideas and development (and the attendant risks and corruptions); about the purity of isolation (human and societal) versus the messy glory of contact, pluralism and global trade … Its pacing can be challenging, and its idiosyncrasies are many. But it offers innumerable rewards for the patient reader and confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.
David Grann
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[a] disturbing and riveting book ... If this all sounds like the plot of a detective novel, you have fallen under the spell of David Grann’s brilliance...As a reporter he is dogged and exacting, with a singular ability to uncover and incorporate obscure journals, depositions and ledgers without ever letting the plot sag. As a writer he is generous of spirit, willing to give even the most scurrilous of characters the benefit of the doubt ... in these last pages, Grann takes what was already a fascinating and disciplined recording of a forgotten chapter in American history, and with the help of contemporary Osage tribe members, he illuminates a sickening conspiracy that goes far deeper than those four years of horror. It will sear your soul.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
