Playing with Realism

...The man who would be acclaimed as Brazil's greatest writer was bom in 1839, the mixed race son of a white mother and a poor house painter whose parents were freed slaves...

...The first was The Posthumous Memoirs (translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa), purportedly a life recounted from beyond the grave—where, according to the author, his hero has achieved an enviable degree of objectivity...

...Solitary, retiring, shrewd, and soulful Senhor José, the one character with a name, is of the clerical tribe made archetypal by Kafka, but there is a difference...

...By casting doubt on who is really in charge of the narrative, Machado manages to cast everything else in doubt too...

...It also had a 1952 English incarnation as Epitaph of a Small Winner, translated by William L. Grossman...

...Esau and Jacob claims to be the last volume of a retired diplomat's memoirs...

...The hero of All the Names is a 50-year-old clerk at the vast, gloomy, soulless Central Registry, where handwritten files, musty and yellowing, record all births, marriages and deaths...

...It was possible that the regime would, but one also changes clothes without changing skin...

...They were...

...In his passion to escape from the world of mere paper, to bestow value on one living, breathing person, Senhor José has broken out of a stifling system...

...He has the social virtue of apparently agreeing with everyone, and not out of weakness...

...Against the backdrop of swift and dramatic seizures of power, the characters weave and wobble, driven by temperament and self-interest, intent only on their own fortunes...

...Finally, Senhor José goes to her apartment and hears her message on the answering machine: "I'm not at home right now," in a voice "grave, veiled, as if distracted...

...Putting his job and his health in jeopardy, he seeks out people who might have known the woman, haunts the buildings where she may have lived, forms a touching friendship with one of her old neighbors, and in a scene of exalted frenzy and anxiety breaks into the school she attended to find her record cards in a cobwebbed attic...

...For in the end, a deep skepticism informs the whole airy story—along with rueful amusement at the wayward impulses of human nature...

...This is the closest he gets, and this is the end...

...Frankly, I don't like it when people go about guessing and composing a book that is being written methodically...

...Don't be afraid," an inner voice reassures him as he gropes through the dark maze of dead files, "the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin...

...True, we are led, or misled, to read the novel as an allegory of national destiny, with Mother Natividad as old imperial Brazil, Flora as new republican Brazil, and the twins as the forces competing to win her...

...The clerk expects disgrace and ruin, but instead the Registrar rewards him...

...Just as Esau and Jacob is masked as political satire, All the Names can be read as a mordant vision of bureaucratic surveillance brought to absurd heights: "It is those names and dates that give legal existence to the reality of existence...

...Both fall in love with Flora, the "inexplicable" daughter of a provincial governor ousted from his last post, ready to sway with any realignment of power...

...The clerk visits the General Cemetery, a place not very different from the Central Registry, except that in its constant need for space it has expanded through the city like an infinitely branching tree...

...It turns out that a shepherd who grazes his flock in the cemetery constantly switches the grave markers, to assure the suicides the privacy and anonymity they obviously sought...

...All the Names concludes in a conundrum like an Escher drawing, suggesting that the barriers between life and death may be more supple than we ever dreamed...

...This dazzling novel twists the heart, while leaving the reader soothed and elated...

...The twins' fierce and funny antipathy grows as fast as they do...

...Santos père is a crass wealthy banker who rose from poverty by shrewd speculation...

...Machado's life was as unaccountable as his novels...

...his wife, the beautiful Natividad, is faithful despite ample temptation, and wildly ambitious for her infant sons—so ambitious that in the opening pages she consults a cabocla, an Indian fortune-teller, about their future...

...They have little in common with Esau and Jacob except their rivalry, another of Machado's jokes...

...Beyond that, his fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism fill 31 volumes...

...Is this one more authorial joke...

...He can't give up the quest, which has become his reason for being...

...Esau and Jacob, published in 1904 and set amid the political storm and strife of late 19th-century Rio de Janeiro, is his second work to appear in Oxford's Library of Latin America series...

...The most self-conscious of writers, he addresses us with genial insolence, or with avuncular wisdom, or in the complicit tones of a confiding crony...

...The cabocla foretells greatness and glory for the boys...

...How amused Machado would have been by the comparison to Erasmus' Praise of Polly, rather than Folly, in the carelessly edited Introduction to The Posthumous Memoirs) Portugal's contemporary Nobel Prize-winner, José Saramago, surely knows Machado, with whom he shares not only a language but an elastic sense of reality...

...Senhor José both wants and doesn't want, he both desires and fears what he desires, that is what his whole life has been like...

...like neckties of a particular color, that they wore until they got tired of the color and another came along...

...It was a notable year: The long war with Paraguay ended and the Republican Party, which would overthrow the Empire in 1889, was founded...

...To his dismay, he finds the unknown woman buried in the section reserved for suicides...

...No more can be done, or so he thinks...

...Were his works making their initial appearance today, Machado might well be meat and drink for postmodern theorists...

...Aires' "memoir" is written in the third person, andhe himself does not tum up until Chapter XL "The man Aires who just appeared still retains some of the virtues of the times, and almost none of the vices...

...If you want to write the book, I offer you the pen, paper, and an admiring reader...

...The climax comes when Senhor José discovers that the woman is dead, has died even as he was so perilously seeking her...

...Can Flora's father shift his views deftly enough to win a new government post...

...With time and patience everyone ends up here, the Central Registry, from this point of view, is merely a tributary of the General Cemetery...

...The urbane Counselor Aires, a ladies' man in his day, has a philosophical turn of mind, yet is as comfortable in the drawing rooms of Rio's moneyed classes as in his study...

...Slavery is abolished in 1888, the republic is established a year later, and soon the twins are elected to the Chamber of Deputies...

...But Flora, though obsessed with the twins, cannot choose between them...

...Saramago's In the Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis also blurred the lines between the dead and the living, as well as the real and the fictional: Its borrowed hero is an alter ego invented by the revered and eccentric Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under the names of four distinct personas...

...The novel's epigraph, from Dante's Inferno, alludes to souls doomed not to fulfill their destinies...

...They merge in her mind—comically, mystically, poignantly—until in her bafflement she sickens and dies...

...He has demonstrated that the living and the dead are not separate, that in our endless procession we are all one—all the names must be remembered and granted their humanity...

...The files of the living and the dead are kept separate, but given the fallibility of filing systems, "an embarrassing fringe of confusion" grows between them, especially in the nether labyrinthine regions of the dead...

...Soon he is embarked—with some ambivalence—on an excruciating and risky quest that proves to be the great adventure of his life...

...Under his fearsome gaze, all work in silence and each in proportion to his rank—the lowliest the most burdened and the highest the idlest...

...Like Blindness, the tale unfurls in Saramago's very long, very precise sentences, as hypnotic and ramifying as the paths of the Central Registry itself (and exquisitely translated by Margaret Jull Costa...

...Saramago's novel brings Ricardo Reis to meet his maker, Pessoa, and follow him to the next world...

...Great and glorious, however, they are not...

...The monarchist Pedro becomes a doctor, the contentious republican Paulo a lawyer...

...All the same, his narrators insist they are simply reporting events as they happened...

...Nothing we read can be taken at face value, nothing is secure, everything is as suspicious and fragile as the financial boom after the fall of the Empire, turning beggars into millionaires and empty-headed young men into deputies...

...You carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...

...That was the miracle worked by the Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper...

...Drama comes from the imagined interrogations Senhor José's pervasive anxiety conjures up, and from his more comforting dialogues with the "calm voice of good sense," or with the ceiling he stares at in his shabby room...

...In spite of his 40 years, or 42, andperhaps because of this, he was a fine specimen of a man...

...Another twist complicates the feinting, elusive strategy...

...Saramago also uses the workaday tools of realism—detailed description, all too recognizable characters—to subvert the notion of realism...

...He is the first to acknowledge that his characters are pure artifice, chess pieces—though sharply drawn and located on the social chessboard—and that the written text is enigmatic until "the attentive reader, truly ruminant," has chewed it in "the four stomachs in his brain...

...What, then, holds this colorful crazy quilt together...

...A surprise comes in the last two pages, when Senhor José returns home to find the Registrar himself seated at his humble kitchen table, perusing the paper trail of his escapade...

...A friend of the Santos family and mildly in love with the lady of the house...

...He inadvertently carries home the file card of an unknown woman, 36, divorced...

...Rather, he understands the rootless nature of opinions and ideology...

...But a political reading, not to mention a Biblical one, is contingent, its claims merely ironic...

...Kafka's clerks were overcome by their own insignificance, but Senhor José escapes the straitened clerkship mode by a desperate and heroic stab at recovering his humanity...

...Will Santos lose his money in the volatile stock market...

...He goes home drenched by rain, wracked by flu, clutching a handful of childhood photographs...

...just goes to show that it is in moments of extreme duress that the spirit gives the true measure of its greatness," he spends the night beside her grave, or what he hopes is her grave...

...And so confusion reigns among the dead as among the living...

...His tolerance for human folly recalls Chekhov, but his mode is lighter and more detached: "a playful pen" dipped in "melancholy ink" that sprinkles the narrative with overt and covert allusions to Tristram Shandy, Dante, the Bible, Voltaire —the list is long, his erudition vast...

...Unlike critical theorists, Machado has a mellow sense of humor: Esau and Jacob (Oxford, 368 pp., S35.00) shows its author to be a humane nihilist who mitigates chaos by language and wit...

...Machado's wry voice speaking through Aires, simultaneously reporting events and undercutting their import...

...Aires tells the story of Pedro and Paulo Santos, twins born in 1870, during Brazil's Second Empire...

...the cabocla inquires...

...Not just Pedro and Paulo of the new Brazil, but all of us, Machado suggests, meet that sorry fate...

...In their shared bedroom, one hangs a portrait of Louis XVI, the other, of Robespierre...

...The Registry's strict hierarchy is organized with suitable rigor, from the eight lowliest clerks seated in front, to the top of the pyramid where the omnipotent Registrar, whose "brain is like a duplicate of the Central Registry," presides...

...And since the Registrar is omnipotent and the files are only paper, the clerk's quest may not be over yet...

...On Fiction Playing with Realism By Lynne Sharon Schwartz "THE MAIN DEFECT of this book is you, reader," declares the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by the prodigious 19th-century Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis...

...In 1880, having written three conventional novels, Machado emerged from a severe illness as if from a sea change, becoming a whimsical, digressive chronicler of existential limbo...

...Not exactly the tone of a memoirist (uncertain how old he is...

...But if you wish only to read, be still, go line by line...

...Even the twins' political opinions "were not exactly opinions, as they did not have large or small roots...

...He wouldhave lovedBorges had he lived long enough to read him, but he died in 1909...

...But Saramago's real passion lies elsewhere, in the transformation of his clerk from one of the living dead into yearning, palpitating life...

...He had little formal education, but by the age of 15 was working as a typesetter and proofreader, and rose to become a prominent journalist and editor as well as a high-ranking bureaucrat who survived drastic changes in government...

...Yes indeed, Natividad recalls (as did the Biblical Esau and Jacob...

...Stocks were born at high prices, and more numerous than the former offspring of slaves, and with infinite dividends...

...Nothing would change," he thinks...

...Despite his efforts, he has learned very little about her, only that she lived and suffered, and that she is crucial to him...

...Things of the future," she adds, an inane phrase Machado enjoys reiterating (and much better rendered as "Things fated to be" in the immensely superior 1965 translation by Helen Caldwell...

...Suddenly, irrationally, he has to find her...

...Did they fight in the womb...

...Like his earlier novel, Blindness, which won him a wide readership in English, his seventh, All the Names (Harcourt, 238 pp., $24.00), is a parable, a tragicomic pilgrim's progress that offers, at the very last minute, a stunning chance at redemption...

...On a fateful evening, Senhor José, whose humble house adjoins the Central Registry, shockingly breaks the rules by entering after hours in search of birth certificates to round out his collection of celebrity clippings—a distraction in his lonely hours...

...In sorrow, Pedro and Paulo swear an amity that proves beyond their antithetical natures to sustain...

...Displaying a courage which...