Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: Mixed Experience History Month

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is regarded as Brazil's greatest novelist.  He was the son of a mulatto house painter and a Portugese woman, and the grandson of freed slaves.  Raised by his step-mother, a mulatto cook, Machado received little formal education.  It was during the years he worked as a salesman and proofreader, he started writing stories, poems and novels.  In his twenties, he began to gain fame as a poet.  In total, he wrote nine novels, eight short-story collections, four volumes of poetry, 13 plays and many critical essays.  His 1881 novel Posthumous Reminiscences of Bras Cuba in which the narrator tells the story of his life after his death was a break from his previous work and now the kind of writing for which he is most known.  "His use of an unreliable first-person narrator, multiple perspectives, philosophical speculations, self-consciousness, and other experimentations with literary techniques also anticipated the 20th-century avant-garde."  His writing which has been called "sceptical, ironic, comedic [and] ultimately pessimistic" became a major influence on writers such as Nobel Winner Jose Saramago, and Carlos Fuentes.  Machado died in 1908.