A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories

The stories in this book, many of them published in English for the first time, are taken from Machado de Assis's mature period of life. They echo Poe and Gogol, anticipate Joyce, and have been compared to contemporary works by Chekhov, Maupassant and Henry James, yet they are not quite like any of these: they are - well - pure Machado de Assis.

For example, two gentlemen standing outside a church in Rio de Janeiro see a respectable lady emerge - one of them has an unexpected, and to him inexplicable, story to tell about her past life as a prostitute; a popular composer of polkas burns the midnight oil in a desperate attempt to create great classical music, haunted by the fear that he will only achieve another perfect polka; a teenager finds himself captivated by the sight of the bare arms of an older woman who lives with his employer; an impoverished, lazy young man turns to the lucrative trade of catching runaway slaves; while the title story, beginning with a mock-heroic invocation ('Muse, sing of the anger of Mariana, the wife of the lawyer Conrado Seabra, that morning in April 1879'), tells of a bored wife who has a tiff with her husband about the hat he wears to work each day, and decides to go out on the town with a more daring, flirtatious friend to see what other 'male and female hats' get upto.

John Gledson's sparkling translations of a master storywriter's work are pure pleasure to read.