Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, a grandson of slaves.

By LARRY ROHTER

When the novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis died 100 years ago last month, his passing went little noticed outside his native Brazil. But in recent years he has been transformed from a fringe figure in the Englishspeaking world into a literary favorite and trendsetter .
Susan Sontag once called him “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America,” surpassing even Borges. In his 2002 book “Genius,” the critic Harold Bloom went even further, saying that Machado was “the supreme black literary artist to date.”
Comparisons to Flaubert and Henry James, Beckett and Kafka abound, and John Barth and Donald Barthelme have claimed him as an influence.
All of that makes for a change of fortune that Machado, with his exquisite sense of the improbable, would surely have appreciated. After all, his most celebrated novel, “The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas,” purports to be the autobiography of a decadent aristocrat reflecting on his life’s disappointments and failures from beyond the grave.
Mr. Bloom describes Machado as “a kind of miracle.” Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, Machado was the grandson of slaves, his father a housepainter and his mother a white immigrant washerwoman from the Azores. Enormously cultured and erudite, he worked as a typesetter’s apprentice and journalist before becoming a novelist, poet and playwright.
Eventually Machado took a post in the Ministry of Agriculture, married a Portuguese woman of noble descent and settled into a middle-class life that allowed him to build a parallel career as a translator of Shakespeare, Hugo and other literary lions. But around 40, when he was already suffering from epilepsy, his health worsened, and he nearly lost his sight, a crisis that seemed to provoke a radical change in his style, attitude and focus.
Over the next quarter century Machado produced the five somewhat interlinked novels that made his reputation. Though foreign critics tend to regard the exuberantly nihilistic “Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas,” published in 1881, as his masterpiece, many Brazilians prefer the more melancholy “Dom Casmurro” (1899), which focuses on the corrosive effect of sexual jealousy.
For the most part, Brazilians have been delighted to see Machado’s prestige rising, though they too question why it took so long. And a few dissenters complain that the Machado now celebrated in the English-speaking world is a misrepresentation.
Enthusiasts in the United States and Britain “are making Machado appear less and less like Machado,” critic and author Antonio Goncalves Filho said at a symposium in Sao Paulo in August. “Actually, they are making the writer white, like Michael Jackson. All of a sudden, he’s become ‘universal.’ ”
Roberto Schwarz, one of Brazil’s experts on Machado, disregarded those concerns. “It is always good for a writer to be recognized,” he said. “Machado is being given the esteem he deserves because of his huge capacity to universalize local problems. Brazilians and foreigners may see him from different angles, but Machado himself, he doesn’t take one side or the other, and pokes fun at both.”