Questões de Inglês

T E X T

    EL TIGRE, Venezuela — Thousands of workers are fleeing Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, abandoning once-coveted jobs made worthless by the worst inflation in the world. And now the hemorrhaging is threatening the nation’s chances of overcoming its long economic collapse.

    Desperate oil workers and criminals are also stripping the oil company of vital equipment, vehicles, pumps and copper wiring, carrying off whatever they can to make money. The double drain — of people and hardware — is further crippling a company that has been teetering for years yet remains the country’s most important source of income.

    The timing could not be worse for Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who was re-elected last month in a vote that has been widely condemned by leaders across the hemisphere. Prominent opposition politicians were either barred from competing in the election, imprisoned or in exile.

    But while Mr. Maduro has firm control over the country, Venezuela is on its knees economically, buckled by hyperinflation and a history of mismanagement. Widespread hunger, political strife, devastating shortages of medicine and an exodus of well over a million people in recent years have turned this country, once the economic envy of many of its neighbors, into a crisis that is spilling over international borders.

    If Mr. Maduro is going to find a way out of the mess, the key will be oil: virtually the only source of hard currency for a nation with the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves. But each month Venezuela produces less of it. Offices at the state oil company are emptying out, crews in the field are at half strength, pickup trucks are stolen and vital materials vanish. All of this is adding to the severe problems at the company that were already acute because of corruption, poor maintenance, crippling debts, the loss of professionals and even a lack of spare parts.

    Now workers at all levels are walking away in large numbers, sometimes literally taking pieces of the company with them, union leaders, oil executives and workers say.

    A job with Petróleos de Venezuela, known as Pdvsa, used to be a ticket to the Venezuelan Dream. No more.

    Inflation in Venezuela is projected to reach an astounding 13,000 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. When The New York Times interviewed Mr. Navas in May, the monthly salary for a worker like him was barely enough to buy a whole chicken or two pounds of beef. But with prices going up so quickly, it buys even less now.

    Junior Martínez, 28, who has worked in the oil industry for eight years, is assembling papers, including his diploma as a chemical engineer. His wife and her daughter left three months ago to earn money in Brazil. “I get 1,400,000 bolívars a week and it isn’t even enough to buy a carton of eggs or a tube of toothpaste,” Mr. Martínez said of his salary in bolívars, Venezuela’s currency.

    Mr. Martínez’s father, Ovidio Martínez, 55, recalled growing up here when the oil boom began. He cried as he spoke of his son’s determination to leave the country. “You watch your children leave and you can’t stop them,” the elder Mr. Martínez said, fighting back tears. “In this country, they don’t have a future.”

    In El Tigre, hundreds of people stood in line one recent morning outside a supermarket, many waiting since the evening before to buy whatever food they could.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 14, 2018. Adapted.

T E X T

    EL TIGRE, Venezuela — Thousands of workers are fleeing Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, abandoning once-coveted jobs made worthless by the worst inflation in the world. And now the hemorrhaging is threatening the nation’s chances of overcoming its long economic collapse.

    Desperate oil workers and criminals are also stripping the oil company of vital equipment, vehicles, pumps and copper wiring, carrying off whatever they can to make money. The double drain — of people and hardware — is further crippling a company that has been teetering for years yet remains the country’s most important source of income.

    The timing could not be worse for Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who was re-elected last month in a vote that has been widely condemned by leaders across the hemisphere. Prominent opposition politicians were either barred from competing in the election, imprisoned or in exile.

    But while Mr. Maduro has firm control over the country, Venezuela is on its knees economically, buckled by hyperinflation and a history of mismanagement. Widespread hunger, political strife, devastating shortages of medicine and an exodus of well over a million people in recent years have turned this country, once the economic envy of many of its neighbors, into a crisis that is spilling over international borders.

    If Mr. Maduro is going to find a way out of the mess, the key will be oil: virtually the only source of hard currency for a nation with the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves. But each month Venezuela produces less of it. Offices at the state oil company are emptying out, crews in the field are at half strength, pickup trucks are stolen and vital materials vanish. All of this is adding to the severe problems at the company that were already acute because of corruption, poor maintenance, crippling debts, the loss of professionals and even a lack of spare parts.

    Now workers at all levels are walking away in large numbers, sometimes literally taking pieces of the company with them, union leaders, oil executives and workers say.

    A job with Petróleos de Venezuela, known as Pdvsa, used to be a ticket to the Venezuelan Dream. No more.

    Inflation in Venezuela is projected to reach an astounding 13,000 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. When The New York Times interviewed Mr. Navas in May, the monthly salary for a worker like him was barely enough to buy a whole chicken or two pounds of beef. But with prices going up so quickly, it buys even less now.

    Junior Martínez, 28, who has worked in the oil industry for eight years, is assembling papers, including his diploma as a chemical engineer. His wife and her daughter left three months ago to earn money in Brazil. “I get 1,400,000 bolívars a week and it isn’t even enough to buy a carton of eggs or a tube of toothpaste,” Mr. Martínez said of his salary in bolívars, Venezuela’s currency.

    Mr. Martínez’s father, Ovidio Martínez, 55, recalled growing up here when the oil boom began. He cried as he spoke of his son’s determination to leave the country. “You watch your children leave and you can’t stop them,” the elder Mr. Martínez said, fighting back tears. “In this country, they don’t have a future.”

    In El Tigre, hundreds of people stood in line one recent morning outside a supermarket, many waiting since the evening before to buy whatever food they could.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 14, 2018. Adapted.

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018

A Master Storyteller from 19th-Century
Brazil, Heir to the Greats and
Entirely Sui Generis 

By Parul Sehgal

    In a famous Hindu parable, three
blind men encounter an elephant for the
first time and try to describe it, each
touching a different part. “An elephant is
[05]  like a snake,” says one, grasping the
trunk. “Nonsense; an elephant is a fan,”
says another, who holds an ear. “A tree
trunk,” insists a third, feeling his way
around a leg.
 [10]    In the Anglophone world, a similar
kind of confusion surrounds Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908),
the son and sly chronicler of Rio de
Janeiro whom Susan Sontag once called
[15]  “the greatest writer ever produced in
Latin America.” To Stefan Zweig,
Machado was Brazil’s answer to Dickens.
To Allen Ginsberg, he was another
Kafka. Harold Bloom called him a
[20]  descendant of Laurence Sterne, and
Philip Roth compared him to Beckett.
Others cite Gogol, Poe, Borges and
Joyce. In the foreword to “The Collected
Stories of Machado de Assis,” published
[25]  this month, the critic Michael Wood
invokes Henry James, Henry Fielding,
Chekhov, Sterne, Nabokov and Calvino
— all in two paragraphs.
    To further complicate matters,
[30]  Machado has always reminded me of
Alice Munro. What’s going on here? 

    What kind of writer induces such
rapturous and wildly inconsistent
characterizations? What kind of writer
[35]  can star in so many different fantasies?
    The protean, stubbornly
unclassifiable Machado was born into
poverty, the mixed-race grandson of
freed slaves. He had no formal education
[40]  or training; like Twain, his
contemporary, he got his start as a
printer’s apprentice. Out of a regimen of
ferocious self-education, he established
himself, initially as a writer of slender
[45]  romances for and about the women of
the ruling elite.
    But in 1879, his style changed —
or rather, it arrived. Prolonged illness
(Machado was epileptic), and the near
[50]  loss of his sight, snapped him to
attention. The gentle romantic
blossomed into a wicked ironist whose
authorial intrusions, jump cuts and sheer
mischief influenced American
[55]  experimentalists like John Barth and
Donald Barthelme.
    Five novels produced in this
period — including his masterpiece, “The
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”
[60]  (1881) — cemented his reputation. If
this collection of 76 stories (culled from
more than 200) cannot rise to their
ranks, it still offers a different and
valuable vantage point — especially for
[65]  readers who like to keep an eye on the
life as well as the art.
    “The Collected Stories” reveals
the arc of Machado’s career, from the
straightforward love stories to the
[70]  cerebral and unpredictable later works.
One story is told from the point of view
of a needle. Political satire begins to
appear. In one tale, a dictator, bald
since youth, decrees that all his subjects
[75]  must also shave their heads, arguing
that the “moral unity of the state
depended on all heads looking the
same.”
    Machado’s stories pulse with life.
[80]  The endings are frequently murky and
strange, often abruptly truncated. The
title of an early work characterizes them
well: “Much Heat, Little Light.” Certain
preoccupations persist: alluring widows,
[85]  naïve young men, a fondness for
coincidence. Machado remained
fascinated by femininity and the
strictures governing the lives of women
— it’s why he reminds me of Munro. Like
[90]  chess pieces, Rio’s well-born ladies could
make only a few authorized moves
(Machado was a chess fanatic), but
everything was theirs to win or lose.
    Above all looms the figure of the
[95]  bibliomane. “This is my family,” one
says, pointing to his bookshelf. These 

are characters shaped by their reading,
sometimes even physically (“his head
jutted forward slightly from his long
[100]  habit”).
    It’s a curious feature of Machado’s
stories that Brazil is so absent. There are
few landmarks, few mentions of the
weather. But there are allusions to
[105]  Molière and Goethe. Novels and authors
are the signposts. Like his characters,
Machado was a creature of literature;
ink ran in his veins. Though he never
roved far from his hometown he read
[110]  widely, claiming all of culture, all of
Europe — giving his work that
remarkably open, cosmopolitan feel.
    This creation of a personal
cartography — of anchoring himself in
[115]  the life of the mind — might explain one
of the lingering frustrations with
Machado’s work: namely, his refusal to
write more explicitly about slavery. He
might not have dared; slavery ended in
[120]  Brazil only in 1888. His stories stay
trained, sometimes monotonously, on
the elite, slaves flitting through in
silence.
    Yet Machado is always writing
[125]  about liberation in his way, which to him
begins with the freedom — the
obligation — to think. Few fiction writers
have written so affectionately about
ideas, as if they were real people; he is
[130]  always describing how ideas emerge and
move, the way they can lose their way
and get caught in a crush with others.
The way they can appear “fully formed
and beautiful” at times, or grow
[135]  “pregnant” with other ideas.
    Ideas and fixations elevate and
distort in these stories. In one, a man
consumed by his pet bird becomes “pure
canary.” In another, a father intent on
[140]  grooming his son to become “a bigwig”
demands he cultivate the necessary
vapidity: “I forbid you to arrive at any
conclusions that have not already been
reached by others. Avoid anything that
[145]  has about it so much as a whiff of
reflection, originality or the like.”
    To Machado, your identity and the
contours of your world are formed not
just by your circumstances but by what
[150]  you think about habitually. You are what
you contemplate, so choose wisely.
These stories are a spectacular place to
start.

From: www.nytimes.com/June 6, 2018