AevumMemorial de Aires, a diary to read slowly
The last book Machado de Assis published in his lifetime is a diary in which almost nothing happens and almost everything is hinted at.
Memorial de Aires came out in 1908, the year Machado de Assis died, and was the last book he published in his lifetime. Whoever opens it finds a diary: that of Counselor Aires, a retired diplomat who had already appeared in Esaú e Jacó, in 1904, and who records, in 1888 and 1889, what happens around him.
The Advertência that opens the book warns that the diary was “pruned” to give a continuous narration. Even so, the diary form remained: dates, small scenes, the voice of someone writing to himself.
What happens
What happens is little, and it is a lot. There are the elderly Aguiar and Dona Carmo, who want their godson Tristão as a son. There is the young widow Fidélia, whom Tristão’s return pulls out of mourning. There are dinners, visits, letters and trams. In the background, without fanfare, the abolition of slavery, on 13 May 1888.
Aires sees everything with fine, discreet irony, and life, as in Machado, happens between the lines.
Two observations from the critics
Two observations from the critics help in reading it.
The first is that Aires is not above what he describes: he is part of the small world he speaks of and writes from the place he holds in it. For Pedro Coelho Fragelli, that is why the abolition appears in passing, between a dinner and a letter, and it is in that tone, the tone of the class the narrator belongs to, that it can be read.
The second is that the diary is more about other people’s lives than his own. Aires tells episodes he did not witness, from what he is told, and even says, on 30 September 1888, that in a diary “exact truth” seems to him more useful than in a work of imagination.
A sentence many readers keep
A line of Shelley’s, I can give not what men call love, returns several times in the book. And the novel ends with a sentence many readers keep: “Consolava-os a saudade de si mesmos” (roughly: “They were consoled by the longing for their former selves”, our translation).
Further reading
FRAGELLI, Pedro Coelho. O Memorial de Aires e a Abolição. Novos Estudos CEBRAP, no. 79, November 2007, pp. 195-208.
Our edition, with more than 80 footnotes, is on the book’s page.