Nabokov and Machado de Assis PDF

Preview

Summary

18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis A ot I had learned of the great Brazilian novelist Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis ut fo (1839–1908) through John Barth’s enthusiasm for him and bought a number N of his novels in 1975 just before switching from Barth back to Nabokov for ho r D my doctoral dissertatio...

Description

18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis

n f. tio oo u Pr rib t r's is ho r D ut fo A ot N

I had learned of the great Brazilian novelist Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) through John Barth’s enthusiasm for him and bought a number of his novels in 1975 just before switching from Barth back to Nabokov for my doctoral dissertation. The Brazilian writer and social-networking commentator Claudio Soares, inspired in composing his hypertext novel, Santos Dumont No. 8, by Pale Fire and by my website AdaOnline, wrote to me asking what, if anything, Nabokov thought of Machado. I had only sipped a mouthful of Machado’s sparkling but bitter waters but answered that as far as I knew, Nabokov had not known of Machado’s existence but would have loved him. Soares arranged for me to talk at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, of which Machado de Assis was the founding president, on September 17, 2009. I had rashly suggested I could talk on Nabokov and Machado and as the time approached had to devour Machado in great gulps. What a feast. To my taste he ranks among the great fiction writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. He would have made Joyce write differently. His closest literary kin could be Beckett and especially Nabokov. Other pairings I might like to tackle, if life lasts forever and no one else beats me to them: Nabokov and Darwin; Nabokov and William James; Nabokov and T. S. Eliot.

.

For me to come to Rio de Janeiro to talk about Machado at the Casa de Machado seems as foolhardy as traveling back in time to ancient Athens, without knowing Greek, to talk about Plato to an audience of Aristotles. I hope you can accept my tentative foray into your home territory in the spirit in which it’s intended. Vladimir Nabokov, so far as I know, was unaware of the existence of Joaquím Machado de Assis. Had he read him, he would surely have said so



Dq{f37:78aen*4+0kpff"""46:

6152133"""9...