According to the blurb on the back of this Penguin paperback, de Assis was Brazil’s greatest novelist.  (To give you an idea of the timeline here, this was one of his last novels, and was written in 1899.)  Never heard of the guy.  To be fair, though, most of my background in Latin American authors was triggered by my high school Spanish classes, which would exclude this author.  The world of Portuguese language literature is far smaller than that of Spanish language literature.  Anyway! Dom […]