Skeptic from Brazil

EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER (223 pp.) --Machado de Assis--Noonday ($3.50).

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was a shy, epileptic quadroon and Brazil's greatest man of letters: his collected works fill 31 volumes, and range from drama and epic poetry to novels and short stories. Except for a few of his short stories, nobody had ever bothered to translate Machado into English until William L. Grossman, a New York University economics professor, ran across his writings during a 1948 teaching stint in Brazil. Grossman became so fascinated that he spent all his holidays translating one of Machado's best novels, Epitaph of a Small Winner. U.S. readers who share Translator Grossman's enthusiasm for ironic wit and pessimism can enjoy an unusual book that now & then resembles Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Voltaire's Candide.

Human Editions. The hero of Epitaph is a ghost named Braz Cubas, and the book is written in the form of his memoirs. He begins, as a ghost should, with his own funeral. Only eleven people show up, but he receives a handsome eulogy. Braz observes to himself that the government bonds he willed the speaker have undoubtedly oiled his tongue. How truly famous he might have been, he reflects, if he had ever completed his great cure-all--the Braz Cubas "anti-melancholy" plaster--to relieve the despondency of mankind.

As Braz plays back the record of his life, it becomes a melody of might-have-beens. Wellborn and well-to-do, he is fleeced at 17 by a well-built gold digger: "Marcella loved me for 15 months and eleven contos ($5,500); nothing less." Nonetheless, he graduates from college "with complete faith in dark eyes and written constitutions." He becomes engaged to Virgilia, a girl with a "mouth fresh as dawn and insatiable as death," but she jilts him for a politician. He survives the experience, and uses it to sharpen the Braz Cubas philosophy of life, also known as the Theory of Human Editions: "Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that, in turn, will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms."

A Ghost's Summary. In some of Braz's editions he is successively 1) a bachelor recluse, 2) Virgilia's lover, 3) a national deputy who loses his seat with a speech advocating smaller caps for the National Guard, and 4) editor of a newspaper that lasts only six months.

Braz rambles a good bit. He often seems more interested in chewing his philosophical cud than in telling his story. He will drop everything else for an epigram. Samples: "We kill time; time buries us." "One endures with patience the pain in the other fellow's stomach." From his ghost world, he sums up his life on earth as a zero. He has one" satisfaction: "I had no progeny, I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery." That, Braz figures, makes him a "small winner."

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