In his 1881 masterpiece, Epitaph of a Small Winner, the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis instructs his readers to memorize the phrase “the voluptuousness of misery.” “Study it from time to time, and, if you do not succeed in understanding it, you may conclude that you have missed one of the most subtle emotions of which man is capable,” he warns. You will also have missed the key to Machado's sly stories, which make for marvelous miseries.
On the face of it, Machado's fiction is anything but miserable. The 76 pieces amassed in the newly (and deftly) translated Collected Stories are, for the most part, portraits of consummate comfort. Their denizens are the bourgeois inhabitants of fin-de-siècle Rio de Janeiro—doctors and lawyers who enjoy dependable incomes, employ domestic servants, and entertain vague plans to “enter politics,” not out of conviction but out of self-aggrandizing boredom. They occupy themselves chiefly with parties, post-prandial card games, and ill-advised affairs with their friends' and associates' wives. Like his American contemporary and closest literary relative, Henry James, Machado eschews physical descriptions and political commentary in favor of ornate social sketches. The translators of The Collected Stories, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, observe that Machado regards Brazil's cities and landscapes as an “outdoor drawing room.” When his characters dare to venture out of their tastefully furnished homes, they most often head toward Rua do Ouvidor, a boulevard lined with elegant shops.
