This novel will interest the social more than the political historian, for the echoes of governmental upsets and occasional gun volleys at the turn of the ninth decade fall upon the reader’s senses lightly. “I favored the churches, no friends asked for the use of the police but what I granted it,” one inept politician sighs. “I brought twenty persons to trial, others went to jail without trial. Was I supposed to hang people?” (p. 74). His daughter’s affections are sought by the twin sons of an imperial banker-baron. One favors the monarchy, the other the republic. As it must turn out in Machado’s Brazil, order does not preclude progress, nor does progress order.
The infants’ mother learns of their destiny for greatness from a cabocla fortune teller. Disdaining “childish beliefs,” (p. 44) the father turns to and gets the same message from a spiritualistic medium (“put a wand in his hand and you would have a sorcerer”) in a finely ironic scene (p. 37). Both baroness and baron, then, are conventional sobrado types— ecletic, church-going bourgeois of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The climax of the story of the damsel and the twins, told by a world-weary ex-diplomat, comes not when Pedro and Paulo successfully stand for election as deputies in opposing parties but rather when Flora (Brazil?) dies, incapable to the last of choosing between them.
Very well translated, Esau and Jacob is chock-full of carioca culture, gentle satire, social vignettes, and Machadian tag lines.
