Slices of madness from a Brazilian master

SHORT STORYMANY WRITERS want to be clever, some are, but few, very few, are as clever as a singular Brazilian-born Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, better known, at least in Brazil where he is revered, as Machado de Assis.

The publication of this dazzling volume of 20 "Now You See It, Though Possibly You Don't" tales, guaranteed to leave most unsuspecting readers eager for more, amounts to an act of inspiration in this the centenary year of his death.

Time and again throughout these sharp, elegant and always brilliantly understated slices of controlled madness, de Assis, a master of the anecdotal, achieves the elusive offbeat surrealist effect that Paul Auster has been pursuing for his entire career.

The stories, most of which were originally published in magazines and newspapers, were written between 1878 and 1906 - they do echo Gogol, and it does no disservice to de Assis, author of the enduring Brazilian classic, Dom Casmurro (1899), to admit that when reading him one may often have to remind oneself that these tales are not the work of a 19th century Russian master. His Russian irony and that distinctive, conversational flair for the strange are qualities that he has passed on in abundance to his most obvious, and certainly most well known literary descendant, Portugal's 1998 Nobel Literature Laureate, José Saramago.

In fact Saramago's finest novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) could almost have been written by de Assis.

He has been compared with Mozart in that his style possesses disarming grace lanced with power. Where does his genius lie? In his epigrammatic tone, the sharp wit and the economy. De Assis, whether writing in the first or third person, always achieves a balanced tone of subtle, almost amused, curiosity. It is as if he looks at the world through a glass that magnifies the absurdity of everything.

Above all, his narrators, and narrative voice, convey a supreme, at times even gossipy, fascination in the oddities of human behaviour. True, several of the stories here will be familiar through anthologies, but as translator John Gledson points out in his introduction there have only been two English language collections published to date, in 1963 and 1977.

Gledson's translations from the original Portuguese, it should be noted, are superb, conveying the irony as well as that underlying curiosity - the curiosity that makes a great writer. Bloomsbury has also published two de Assis novels, Epitaph of a Small Wonder (1880) and Philosopher or Dog? (1891)

"The school was in the Rua do Costa, a little two-storey house with railings. The year was 1840," recalls the narrator of A Schoolboy's Story. "That day - a Monday in May - I lingered for a moment in the Rua da Princesa to see where I might go and play that morning. I hesitated between Diogo hill and the Campo de Santana, which wasn't yet the polite park it is today, but a more or less infinite rustic space, full of washerwomen, grass and loose donkeys. The hill or the Campo? That was the problem. Suddenly I said to myself that school was the best notion. I made my way towards school. Here's the reason."

Sustaining that tone of candour, the narrator goes on to explain his temptation and subsequent hesitation, followed by his decision to go to school. "The previous week I'd played truant twice, and when I was found out got due recompense from my father - a hiding with a quince rod."

De Assis being de Assis, the rod is no ordinary rod - it has to be quince. Very quickly into the tale it becomes clear that the narrator would have been better not going to school at all that day. Elsewhere in Those Cousins From Sapucaia! the narrator describes noticing a beautiful woman pass by while he stands waiting near a church doorway as the cousins of the title take holy water.

"To explain my agitation, it has to be said that this was the second time I'd seen her. The first was at the races, two months before, with a man who, to all appearances, was her husband, but could just as easily have been her father. She was a bit of a spectacle, dressed in scarlet, with big showy trimmings, and a pair of earrings that were too large, but her eyes and mouth made up for the rest." Within a couple of sentences, there are sufficient allusions to suggest the lady's character. The narrator imagines his romance with her but the reality proves darker, more cautionary.

In one of the finest stories in what is a collection of strong, vivid, crafted tales, two men are chatting, well, gossiping - the object of attention is a woman. "Do you see that lady over there, going into the Holy Cross Church?" asks one of the other. Then the character sketch begins. Is she a widow? No. Is she a spinster? "Sort of. She must be called Dona Maria something-or-other. In 1860 she was commonly known as Marocas. She wasn't a seamstress, she didn't own property, she didn't run a school for girls; you'll get there, by process of elimination . . . " As the pair look on, the woman's story takes shape.

De Assis has his own story. Born into poverty in Brazil in 1839, he was a mulatto and so was suspended between the white and black populations. After working as a newspaper reporter, he entered the civil service and also married the sister of an established poet with whom de Assis was friendly. The logic and realism that drive his fiction must have been second nature to de Assis as he appears to have done well never irritating or offending. After his marriage he settled outside Rio and never left. One of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, he was in 1897 elected its first president.

There is some confusion as to whether he was born epileptic, or whether he developed it later in life, or if his condition simply worsened. But de Assis, who was happy in his married life yet had no children, remained ever affable. Producing more than 200 short stories and nine novels including Esau and Jacob, The Wager and Yaya Garcia as well as Dom Casmurro, which remains Brazil's most revered novel, featuring as it does Capitu, the best known character in Brazilian fiction, he only ceased writing less than two years before his death in 1908 at the age of 69. And, yes there was a state funeral and national mourning at his passing.

Taking its title from a story, more a fable, in which a bored wife complains about her husband's choice of hat, here is an enticing volume guaranteed to beguile and unsettle - Machado de Assis enjoyed keeping the reader guessing - and continues to do so.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times