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Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 1 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. While this item contains the entire text of Quincas Borba, it is filled with typographical errors. Perhaps this should come as no surprise since on the back cover of this item, the main character's name is misspelled.


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Does Luso-Brazilian Books not have a Portuguese-reading copy-editor? There is roughly one error per page. Most of these merged words, unnecessary hyphens are merely frustrating, but others seriously slow down the reading process, and in a few cases I had to consult an English translation to understand what certain sentences was trying to say. This description doesn't just apply to Quincas Borba.

Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro are just as deficient. Showing of 6 reviews.

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Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Most readers and reviewers of the works of Joachim Maria Machado de Assis lay emphasis on the 'modernity' of his writing: There's nothing wrong with that interpretation; Machado is clearly unlike any other writer in any language in his half of the 19th C. But he had a model, an obvious influence whom he acknowledges in his books: The linkage between Sterne and Machado is more than stylistic.

It's the centrality of "sentiment" in their narratives. I don't mean "sentimentality" in the current sense of excessively sloppy emotion. In the literature of the 18th C, "sentiment" referred to an heightened sensitivity, a keen aesthetic sympathy, a 'feminine' receptivity to experience, and among English writers like Sterne and Fielding, a disposition toward mockery of conventions.

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Goethe was a 'sentimental' writer in extremis, but without that fine sense of mockery. Rather than being a modernist, to my mind, Machado de Assis was the last 18th C sentimentalist. That doesn't preclude the fact that his influence on later Brazilian and Hispanic-American writers was modernizing.

Machado can legitimately be regarded as the founder of Latin American literature, the first world classic of his whole continent. Quincas Borba hasn't found a niche in the 'canon' of classics for most anglophone readers, despite the efforts of Harold Bloom, the great canonizer.


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This recent translation by Gregory Rabassa should open the way to greater recognition. It's fluid and idiomatic in English, and it captures much of the quirky originality of Machado's prose style. Don't look for a well-ordered logical narrative. The author hops in and out of the narrative frame at will. If there's a convention of story-telling, Machado aims to break it. He dances circles around us, sticks out his tongue at our expectations, yet remains as endearing as a mischievous street urchin. And in fact he was born a mischievous street urchin, a colored child in the slums of a Brazilian city.

By chance, he befriends an eccentric 'philosopher' named Quincas Borba, who instructs him that "to the victor belong the potatoes. The new millionaire moves to Rio, falls absurdly in love, suffers obsessions, innocently squanders his wealth with the help of friends Humans delude themselves if they think they are more sensible than dogs.

They're whimsical victims of their own sentiments. The author, who died in , is one of the major figures of 19th century South American literature. It has been translated into a smooth English by Gregory Rabassa. Curiously, the dog is also named Quincas Borba.


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The novel follows Rubiao as he attempts to find love and fulfillment in 19th century Brazil. The novel contains many ironic comments on the craft of writing itself, and examines the political, sexual, and economic complexities of Rubiao's world. The author's writing is peppered with intriguing cultural allusions: Machado de Assis writes with both insight into and compassion for the human condition. Those interested in 19th century literature, Latin American studies, or the development of the novel should definitely read this book. Machado de Assis is a genius.

theranchhands.com: Machado Assis - Drama / Literature & Fiction: Kindle Store

Born from a very poor family, he learned languages during the Brazilian imperial period where lower classes were very limited to access education. He started with very typical romantic novels although with his own style. He married a well educated portuguese woman who introduced him more selected european literature. After 40 years old Machado wrote what we classified as classics.

Quincas Borba - Machado de Assis

Machado's style was not a realistic naturalism writer. He created his own style helping literature to go ahead of his time. This is one of the best books I've ever read! The story of the ascencion and fall of a man, his sanity and madness, make us think about our human condition. Machado de Assis is undobted the best Brazilian writer.