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Title: Counselor Ayres' Memorial by Machado de Assis, Machado De Assis, Helen Caldwell ISBN: 0-520-04775-3 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: January, 1983 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.75

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: If Merchant and Ivory could "go Brazilian".........
Comment: Counselor Ayres, the character, was first found in Machado de Assis' previous novel, "Esau and Jacob" just as Quincas Borba appeared in "Epitaph of a Small Winner" before becoming the main character in another novel. The present volume is rather slow, perhaps "slight" is a fair word, and may leave action-oriented modern readers a little bored. The author shuns his usual catchy chapter titles in COUNSELOR AYRES' MEMORIAL, but he still uses his usual format of dividing the text into short sections because the novel is written in the form of a diary. While Machado de Assis shows in his usual, subtle way, that love is the glue that can hold both individuals and society together, the progress of the novel is languid and the text lacks entirely the wit and irony of his earlier works. Yet I found beauty in the book and sensed the nostalgia for a slower time.

We read a gentle story of an older diplomat (retired) watching the relationships develop and change among four or five other people in the Rio de Janeiro upper class of 1888-89. An attractive widow dedicated to her dead husband whom she had married against the wishes of her family; the godson of a doting old couple, otherwise childless, who returns to Rio after many years in Europe; the old couple themselves who love both widow and godson equally as the children they never had; a sister, an uncle, a malicious gossip---these are the characters we find moving in slow motion through the pages of a diary that reveals, but only slightly, the state of society in Brazil at the time. Slavery was abolished, the Empire had just come to an end, but Machado de Assis wrote more of playing cards, oil painting, piano recitals, and attendance at very European tea parties. It is a novel of a class that ignored the times, a class entirely wrapped up in its own interrelationships.

If you like the films of Merchant and Ivory or perhaps of Indian director Satyajit Ray, if you have a taste for novels that unfold slowly, at their own pace, you may like COUNSELOR AYRES' MEMORIAL because great events and intricate plots are not everything. Personally, I liked this novel, but as I found myself getting a little impatient at times, (and I like those Merchant and Ivory films) I wonder if it would appeal to many in our more-rushed age, hence the three stars. If Jorge Amado's wonderfully-descriptive novels of 20th century Brazil recall the samba and sexual vitality, Afro-Brazilian religion, color, and violence, this novel is more evocative of the piano adagios heard from afar on long-forgotten, hot January afternoons in bougainvillea-filled gardens of the vanished Brazilian aristocracy, and of people too "cultivated" to ever reveal their feelings in public.