The seventeen stories in this anthology have been carefully chosen
to provide a wide, representative range of recent and contemporary
Brazilian themes and styles. The scenes vary from a nearly
abandoned village or a ranch in the northeastern backlands to the
streets of Rio and Sao Paulo. The characters, equally diverse,
embrace wealthy land-owners, middle-class merchants, cowboys,
thieves and prostitues. There is a diversity too in modd.
Especially striking is the irony found in most of these stories.
Characteristic of much of the best Brazilian fiction from Machado
de Assis to Guimaraes Rosa, this irony tempers the underlying
warmth of the stories with a certain wryness. Incidentally,
Guimaraes Rosa, the giant of contemporary Brazilian fiction, is
represented in this collection by an unconventional and
unforgettable little masterpiece, "The Third Bank of the River."
Brazilian humor is siad to be much like North American humor. In
any case, it is here in abundance, variously mordant, hilarious,
casual, homely, nostalgic, and, in Graciliano Ramos's story of an
inept thief, almost Chaplinesque. But there is also a certain
voluptuous melancholy, the much bruited tristeza brasileira. In
such stories as "My Father's Hat," it blend with the humor to
produce and enchantment profoundly Brazilian in ton and feeling.
"The Crime of the Mathematics Professor" is a strange plunge into
the mystery of a man's sense of guilt. With this sole exception,
the stories in the present anthology are thoroughly Brazilian and
yet, by a sort of mass literary miracle, universal. The reader may
find the setting and the manners exotic at times, but he will
understand the people. For there is a pervasive humanity in
Brazil's best writers and, even when the "local color" is striking,
they are never merely parochial. When their settings are provincial
it is because the provinces are where they can see the human comedy
most vividly. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived
program, which commemorates University of California Press's
mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them
voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893,
Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship
accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title
was originally published in 1967.
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