The Devil’s Church & Other Stories     by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Translated by L. Ishimatsu and Jack Schmitt Original title: A Igreja do Diabo Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Texas UP Pub. Date: 1977 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 166 pages List Price: $7.95 Not available for ordering Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £8.95 Not available for ordering

Were it not for the strange unease the reader will feel and find hard to identify, these short stories could be taken as pure entertainment; the amazing results of an attempt by the Devil to establish his own church; the useful and profitable findings of a sage in an exotic place; the disappointment and f-rustration of a man who claims to have come back from the dead; various incidents and accidents in affairs of the heart, updated versions of ancient fables and brief biographies of curious characters.

When, however, the reader starts to appreciate all the richness of details, which are never merely details but convey the meaning of many things which cannot be presented in such short, concise texts; when the uncomfortable complicity created by the narrator with the reader is detected; when the ironical veil is lifted and the sharp critique is revealed, then there are some fascinating meditations on ethics, society and human behaviour.

At the end of the 19th century Machado provides us with a witty depiction of Brazilian bourgeois values and behaviour; but a deeper reading makes us reflect on the relativity of values and virtues, the vanity of knowledge, the doubtful motivation of philanthropy and the emptiness of rhetoric.

Machado’s writing career brought him from the lower social classes to the heights of intellectual eminence but he never lost the acute awareness of a society based on exploitation and hypocrisy. The pleasure of reading him is in appreciating his mastery of style and continually finding fresh layers of meaning.

He proclaimed that the accepted virtues ought to be replaced by others which were the natural, legitimate ones. Vanity, lust and sloth were reinstated, as was avarice, which he declared was only the mother of economy, the difference between the two being that the mother was robust and the daughter skin and bones. Anger had its best justification in the existence of Homer — without Achilles’ fury there would have been no Iliad: «Muse, sing the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus...’ 39