Osman Lins (1924–1978)

Attempted Midnight Seduction?
A review of the Fario Kindle eBook (2012) translated by [author:Juan LePuen|7562771] from the Portuguese (Brazilian) language original short story [book:Missa do Galo|11476266] (1894) first collected in [book:Páginas Recolhidas|18243366] (Collected Pages) (1899).

Missa da Galo (Portuguese: Midnight Mass aka The Rooster's Mass) is a revered story in Brazilian literature and is often cited as the popular favourite of all of Machado de Assis' short stories. It is so show more revered that in [book:Missa do Galo - Variações Sobre o Mesmo Tema|25534924] (Midnight Mass - Variations on the Same Theme) (1977), later 20th century Brazilian authors wrote 6 different versions of it in a tribute.

Rural 17-year-old Nogueira is boarding with the family of a distant relative while going to school in Rio de Janeiro. The man of the house cheats on his wife by using the euphemism of weekly excursions to the "theatre." Nogueira is planning to go to the Christmas Eve midnight mass with a neighbour and in order to keep himself awake is reading Dumas' [book:The Three Musketeers|10916717] (1844). 30-year-old Conceição, the wife in the household, joins him and makes conversation. Nogueira, while observing Conceição's bare arms and negligee, is seemingly oblivious to what might be going on. He is writing the story many years later and still propounds that he doesn't understand what happened.

I can see why the story is so admired. You can make several different scenarios about it. Is Nogueira really a reliable narrator? Is he writing a purposely naïve version in order to portray his youthful innocence? Is he actually this naïve even as an adult? Or did something entirely different take place and this is now the cover story? The reader can imagine all sorts of other reasons and events from the version as stated.

This is part of my continuing investigation into the short stories of Machado de Assis. Previously i had read [book:Holidays|20869939] (1906) and [book:O Caso da Vara|12621387] (1891).

Trivia and Links
Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is considered to be one of Brazil's great writers and his often used metafiction style was ahead of its time. His most popular novels are Dom Casmurro (1899) and The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881).

The works of Machado de Assis are in the Public Domain in their original Brazilian Portuguese and can be found online at various sources such as Machado de Assis. net and Project Gutenberg. With web translator you can even produce your own translations as desired.

You can read the original Brazilian Portuguese version of Missa do Galo here. show less

(could this review be a spoiler?) I enjoyed this book very much at the beginning but by the end I found it hard going. Which I guess is part of the point. But I got worn out with the literary discussion. I think I saw some of the humor but I didn't exactly find it humorous. And I wasn't sure. I think the book he writes about is supposed to be really bad, and some of the joke is all the incredible imagery and careful plotting and profound content he is finding in it. But I wouldn't bet the show more house on it. Maybe it is just supposed to be "modern" without necessarily being good or bad. show less

The best way, I think, to communicate the allure of this book is by quoting it:
The narrator himself describes the novel on page 45:"At this point I conceive of something unfeasible: a work that would present itself as double, built in layers and purporting to be its own analysis. For example, as if there were no Julia Marquezim Enone or The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, as if the present piece of writing were actually the novel by that name and I myself were a fiction."
Again, on page 96: show more "The hybrid space, in which a fixed space and a mobile space come together, is more suggestive and intriguing than the option favoring one alternative or the other."
And, on page 149: "the nature of the artistic object, which is never a depository of meaning but rather a detonator of meanings";
And finally, on page 177: If Maria de Franca's disease (here not so much mental as verbal),"making words like before and after impenetrable, tends to dilute the book in time,the occurrence of real historical events--not in the sequence in which they would have taken place but disconnected, loose, contingent upon random encounters with outdated snatches of news." show less

O fiel e a pedra recorre ao simbolismo do confronto entre o fiel da balança e a pedra de moinho para apresentar a luta de um homem essencialmente ético contra um inimigo poderoso, num mundo pouco afeito à retidão de caráter. No Nordeste dos anos 30, Bernardo, no limiar dos quarenta anos, perdeu um filho e deixou o emprego público para não compactuar com desonestidades. Sem alternativa e quase sem nenhum dinheiro, aceita a oferta de um amigo e vai, com a mulher, administrar a venda de show more uma propriedade distante. O amigo, entretanto, ao descobrir que a mulher era adúltera, passa para o nome do irmão, Nestor, algumas propriedades, a fim de salvá-las da partilha de bens do divórcio, e acaba tendo uma morte suspeita. O confronto entre Bernardo e o novo patrão é sinuoso: Bernardo só tem a certeza de nunca ter traído as próprias convicções. Nestor, mais que destruir o adversário, quer cooptá-lo. Essa luta desigual é narrada numa estrutura de capítulos curtos que produzem, no conjunto, um relato mítico do confronto arquetípico entre o bem e o mal. show less