Machado is also a brilliant stylist, but not in any flamboyant way. He writes in a Portuguese that is deceptively simple and straightforward, but he chooses his words with great precision, and has a superb ear for how people speak, whether it be a jaded old man, a frivolous young woman or a child. Machado’s translator needs to remain very alert if he or she is to capture every nuance.

Machado sprang from the romantic-realist school of literature in Brazil, and his early stories were clearly written for the largely female readership of magazines and newspapers. The turning point came in 1881 with the publication of his novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, almost immediately followed by Miscellaneous Papers, the collection of stories that included “The Alienist” and the six stories that follow it in this selection. For whatever reason, from that point on, his writing took a radically different path from that of his contemporaries. In the case of his short stories, we see a greater inventiveness in form and subject matter, frequently delving into the wilder reaches of his imagination in a way that is often thought to prefigure magical realism—“The Most Serene Republic,” “The Canon, or the Metaphysics of Style,” and “Canary Thoughts” being but three examples. Other stories, particularly the later stories such as “Father Against Mother,” “Maria Cora,” and the “The Tale of the Cabriolet” have their feet more firmly rooted in reality, with a mature and almost elegiac tone. This is not to denigrate the earlier stories, such as “August’a Secret” and “Luis Duarte’s Wedding,” which, if more conventional, are, by turns, touching and funny and satirical, and always hold the reader’s attention, perhaps because of that alluring, coaxing, and often unreliable narrator.

It is difficult fully to measure the influence of Machado de Assis in other Latin American countries, or indeed elsewhere, but the first English translation of three of his short stories did not appear until 1921, and it was another thirty years before English translations of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (under the title Epitaph of a Small Winner) and Dom Casmurro were published. Other translations followed, including somewhat wider selections of his short stories (but never the complete collections), and it was not until the 1990s that eminent American and British writers began to take notice, notably Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Harold Bloom, and Salman Rushdie. One could put this belated recognition down to a certain parochialism among British and American publishers and readers, or to a twentieth-century disdain for so much that was handed down from the nineteenth (ironical in Machado’s case, given that he prefigured so much of what we think of as quintessentially “twentieth” century), but whatever the reason, we can at least take comfort that his precocious genius is being recognized now.