- Home
- Fiction
- Family Life
- Memorial de Ayres (A Novel)
Memorial de Ayres (A Novel)
- Availability: Confirm prior to ordering
- Branding: minimum 50 pieces (add’l costs below)
- Check Freight Rates (branded products only)
Branding Options (v), Availability & Lead Times
- 1-Color Imprint: $2.00 ea.
- Promo-Page Insert: $2.50 ea. (full-color printed, single-sided page)
- Belly-Band Wrap: $2.50 ea. (full-color printed)
- Set-Up Charge: $45 per decoration
- Availability: Product availability changes daily, so please confirm your quantity is available prior to placing an order.
- Branded Products: allow 10 business days from proof approval for production. Branding options may be limited or unavailable based on product design or cover artwork.
- Unbranded Products: allow 3-5 business days for shipping. All Unbranded items receive FREE ground shipping in the US. Inquire for international shipping.
- RETURNS/CANCELLATIONS: All orders, branded or unbranded, are NON-CANCELLABLE and NON-RETURNABLE once a purchase order has been received.
Product Details
Overview
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been hailed as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, a progenitor of modernism and a masterful ironist known for his inspired critiques of nineteenth-century Brazil. Memorial de Ayres is his final novel, released just two months before his death in 1908.
In your hands is the diary of Counselor Ayres, a retired diplomat now dedicated to chronicling his day-to-day happenings during the waning years of the Brazilian Empire. Ayres will be the first to tell you that he lives a simple life: the most eventful part of his week is lunch with his sister Rita or a visit to their family cemetery.
But a new love interest—and a bet with Rita—pushes Ayres from the confines of his quiet routine into the cheery home of the Aguiars, an older couple who, like him, are childless. Soon, the merriment is permeated by whispers that the power of the empire is fading—the end of slavery draws near. As Brazil’s well-to-do ponder the momentous changes afoot over card games and afternoon coffee, Ayres finds himself suddenly unsure of his place in the shifting milieu: “Everything in this world goes in fashions, except for the stars and me.”
Memorial de Ayres marks the latest installment in Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s groundbreaking series of Machado translations, the duo credited with introducing a new generation of readers to the classic author. Shot through with Machado’s signature sly humor and psychological subtlety, and set during a singularly transformative time in Brazil’s history, Memorial de Ayres is a quietly prescient tale of personal and national legacy.
Praise for Machado de Assis
“A writer one hundred years ahead of his time.”
?Salman Rushdie
“A great ironist, a tragic comedian. . . . In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh.”
—Philip Roth
“One of the pleasures of reading Machado is to encounter this comedy of detail, of human particulars.”
—Morten Høi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In the sureness of pace, the ingratiating swerve, Machado is peerless.”
?Elizabeth Hardwick
