Yayá Garcia

Machado de Assis

TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE BY R. L. SCOTT-BUCCLEUCH

First British Commonwealth edition, 1976, Jacket designed by Keith Cunningham

This book is in very good condition. Other than a small tear and crease mark at the top of the dust jacket's front, and a few early pages with slightly loose binding, there is little to suggest that the book is over thirty years old.

Set in Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the nineteenth century, Yayá Garcia tells the story of a man who loves and is loved by two women. Jorge, wealthy and from a good family, falls in love with his mother's ward, Estela. His mother disapproves of the match, and when Estela's pride forces her to agree, Jorge enlists to fight in the Paraguayan war, to find on his return that Estela has married Luis Garcia, a middle-aged man with a daughter, Yayá, only a few years younger than Estela herself. Yayá suspects that the old relationship between Jorge and her stepmother is not dead, and gradually the three protagonists become involved in a pattern of intrigue that threatens the stability of the whole family.

Machado de Assis has been widely acknowledged as Brazil's greatest writer. Yayá Garcia, his fourth novel, published in 1878, occupies a crucial position in his work. A love story told in deceptively simple terms, it displays those qualities of observation, humour and pyschological insight that were to distinguish his later masterpieces: Epitaphs for a Small Winner, Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro and Esau and Jacob. It thus forms a bridge between his early, romantic phase and the realism and free forms of his mature writing.