Word: joaquim
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What is reality? The question has furrowed the higher brows from Sophocles and Heraclitus to Pirandello and John Dewey. To Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, who produced the best in 19th century Brazilian literature, the "problem of reality" was not just a metaphysical "What is it?" The problem was a practical "Can you take it?" In Philosopher or Dog?, the third of his novels to be published in English, Author Machado tells what happens to a man who can't take...
...Assis' Epitaph of a Small Winner was published in the U.S. last summer (TIME, July 31), reviewers set up a cheer over the strange new star caught in their literary telescopes. Acclaimed in his own land and lifetime (1839-1908) as Brazil's greatest man of letters, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis would doubtless have relished the irony of this posthumous foreign recognition for a novel whose hero is a garrulous ghost, bent on describing his own small genius for failure while alive. Dom Casmurro is a more poignant and more muted Epitaph of a Small Winner...
...Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was a shy, epileptic quadroon and Brazil's greatest man of letters: his collected works fill 31 volumes, and range from drama and epic poetry to novels and short stories. Except for a few of his short stories, nobody had ever bothered to translate Machado into English until William L. Grossman, a New York University economics professor, ran across his writings during a 1948 teaching stint in Brazil. Grossman became so fascinated that he spent all his holidays translating one of Machado's best novels, Epitaph of a Small Winner...
Whatever happens at Rio, one man stands to gain. He is sharp-eyed Joaquim Rolla, owner of the Quitandinha Hotel. Anxious to stamp a legitimate "Quitandinha" dateline on the deliberations, Rolla got the Brazilian Government to install a postoffice in the building. Recently his pressagent, dining a group of reporters at the lakeside chalet, hopped up and cried, "Wait a minute, gentlemen." The reporters, forks in midair, waited. "Remember," he shouted, "this is to be the Quitandinha Conference...
...housed in one place, away from the distractions of Rio. Another: the hotel, its casino dark, has been losing $10,000 a month ever since the Government ended licensed gambling last year (TIME, May 13, 1946). Holding the conference there would be one way of partially repaying suave Joaquim Rolla, Brazil's former gambling king, and owner of Quitandinha...