Loops in Brazil

ESAU & JACOB by Machado de Assis. 287 pages. University of California. $5.

The aging tycoons were enjoying the fruits of their conquests in the world of finance and politics. Their sons and daughters were whirling at fashionable balls, attending the opera and negotiating advantageous marriages. Along the gaslit avenues, streetcars were beginning to compete with horse-drawn landaus. Sounds like some place in fin-de-siecle Europe? Actually it is Rio de Janeiro during the last quarter of the 19th century, as affectionately remembered by Brazil's extraordinary novelist, Machado de Assis, who died in 1908. A popular author during his lifetime, Machado was rediscovered in Brazil at the time of the centenary of his birth (1939). Since then, translations of his works (Epitaph of a Small Winner, Dom Casmurro) have begun to trickle into the U.S. market.

The wispy plot begins with the birth of twins--an event so supernatural that the mother secretly consults a seer. The seer predicts that Peter and Paul will fight with each other in life as they have already done in their mother's womb. And so it turns out. When they grow up, both brothers fall in love with the lovely Flora, and she with them. This impasse is climaxed and, in a way, resolved in a hallucinatory scene in which Flora passes inward through their eyes until she penetrates their souls. Once inside their secret selves she finds them--identical.

Long before this, however, it has been apparent that the story is less important than the telling, and the characters less than the narrator, who is one Ayres, an accomplished diplomat. He wants the reader ("dear lady") to get everything straight, and makes delectable use of metaphor, hyperbole, quotation and epigram to facilitate comprehension. The narration itself forms a lacy fabric composed of a series of narrative loops, deftly thrown into the past and winding up where they started. Each loop fills a tiny chapter, and 121 chapters make a calculated pattern that is as satisfying (and sometimes as claustrophobic) as only perfection can be.

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