To return to the stories themselves, some critics, perhaps somewhat dismissively, describe the early stories as belonging to Machado’s “romantic phase,” and while some of the plots could be viewed as such, the coolly ironic voice in which they are told already seems strikingly modern. In fact, that voice may have had its origins in two books that seem to have been a major influence on Machado’s own writing: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room. As readers, we are both fully aware that these stories are fiction and simultaneously drawn in as gullible readers. Our narrator is often unromantically unreliable, too, claiming that he can’t tell us a character’s name or doesn’t know it or has forgotten, or declaring that what happened next was quite simply indescribable and then going on to describe it in detail. The first-person narrators are no better in this respect and, like us, have faulty memories and cannot necessarily be trusted.

Machado was passionately interested in chess and was himself a brilliant player. In his stories, too, he is very much the grand master, placing his pieces on the board and then seeing what happens, how those pieces react and interact.

One of Machado’s main themes is obsession, and it is a strong presence from the earliest stories to the last. Some characters are merely obsessed with themselves, with losing their looks or their money; others are obsessed with the past or with rereading the same books over and over, or accumulating as much money as possible, or, in the marvelous Swiftian short story–cum–novella “The Alienist,” with imposing a particular psychological theory on society as a whole, and here obsession veers into outright madness. Jealousy, too—another form of obsession—raises its ugly head in many stories; in some cases the characters land safely on the other side of a bout of jealousy, while others are left standing amid the debris of a marriage.

The repeated, seemingly erudite, references—Dante, Rabelais, Homer, Socrates, Pascal, Molière, Milton, Hegel, to name but a few—are part of that thread of sly humor running through his work. Is the assumption that we, the readers, are equally erudite or is he just playing with us, as he appears to be with the often slightly inaccurate quotations with which he sprinkles the stories?