Machado de Assis’s the central figure of Brazilian literature, he wrote most of his work between 1870 and 1908, and in 2018 Liveright published a swollen (960 pages!) new English translation of his collected stories. For a taste of this work, consider two stories that depict characters of a certain type serving as their own hangmen.

In “Augusta’s Secret,” the near bankrupt libertine Vasconcelos readily agrees to marry his daughter to the wealthy miscreant Gomes, hoping this will make him solvent. Vasconcelos’s financial difficulties resulted from the delicate rapprochement he and his eponymous wife Augusta have worked out: he can habitually embrace all of Rio de Janeiro’s charms until the early morning hours and she can wantonly indulge her vanity and taste for the latest Milanese and Parisian fashions. They seem happy, until Augusta voices her disapproval of her daughter’s marriage to Gomes, without providing an understandable or coherent reason. Well, you probably guessed it: Gomes is himself bankrupt as a result of his own profligacy, and had only proposed to Vansconcelos’s daughter to save himself from ruin. In a comic meeting, Gomes and Vasconcelos learn the truth about one another’s finances and cancel the nuptial, pretending to do so in the best interest of Vasconcelos’s daughter. Vasconcelos then eavesdrops on his wife and discovers “the secret”: that Augusta opposed the marriage because she considers herself too young and beautiful to become a grandmother.  Vasconcelos narrowly avoided giving away his daughter for nothing, to a man who would despise her upon discovering the truth, and yet it’s clear he remains a slave to his and his wife’s egoistic bourgeoise desires. More deeply resonant than a mere cautionary tale, the characters feel robust and alive, and their self-laid traps both humorous and cruel.

In “An Alexandrian Tale,” two enlightened Greek philosophers travel to Alexandria to dispense wisdom and conduct metaphysical experiments. They theorize that the blood of animals contains elements that compel certain behaviors; drinking mouse blood, for example, leads to thievery. The Egyptians greatly valued the Greeks’ erudition and provided the two with mice and the necessary laboratory equipment to test their theory, which they do immediately, eviscerating mouse after mouse in a way that maximizes pain in order to discover the precise behavioral mechanism. Furthermore, in the interest of scientific rigor, both men begin drinking mouse blood and, sure enough, “cast all their metaphysical baggage into the Nile, and [become] inveterate pilferers.” After warming up with some plagiarism and petty theft, they attempt to smuggle several crucial volumes from the Alexandria library onto an Athens-bound ship and are imprisoned. Meanwhile, the anatomist Herophilos, driven by the same enlightenment-guided desire to get to the bottom of things as the Greeks, convinces Ptolemy to allow him to conduct autopsies on living prisoners in order to more firmly grasp the structures of the sentient human body. Soon enough, our Greek friends are marched into Herophilos’s lab and undergo the same fate as so many of their mice. On the way to their macabre dissection, the philosophers steal a flute and some figs, truly proof that their theory was correct, which proof was–as was the revealed “secret” to Vansconcelos–of little comfort.