Machado about *something*!

The NYT has a piece on the centenary of the death of the great Brazilian writer Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubás).

Here's an excerpt from Dom Casmurro...here's a review of DC and PMOBC (a/k/a Epitaph of a Small Winner) from 1998...And here's the 1953 NYT review of DC!

UPDATE: L.G. Thomas provides the following backup: A piece on MdA in Context, written by Zulkifar Ghose:

He is like one of those monuments in a city square that people drive past presuming he must be someone important but do not stop to read what it is he has accomplished; some, catching the name, might have an obscure recollection which they associate with another culture’s history, but otherwise his only devotees appear to be a small flock of students whose work is not unlike that of pigeons upon a statue—alighting upon him with a belly full of the latest theoretical jargon which might accidentally have highlighted a curious feature of his anatomy were it not indiscriminately deposited on the whole body.

That name of Ghose will ring a bell for B.S. Johnson fans—he was Johnson's great friend.