A Chapter of Hats

What a brave piece of publishing this is. Not only is it a collection of short stories, but a collection of translated short stories at that - and by a South American writer who died in 1908. Bravo, Bloomsbury.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, Joachim Maria Machado de Assis was the mulatto son of poor parents who went on to have a successful career as a civil servant and author. He spent all his life in Brazil's capital city and, as translator John Gledson says, 'knew all about his own world, and plenty about others beyond it he never saw'.

The stories in this collection are beautiful vignettes of nineteenth-century Brazilian life. They sparkle with wit and a maudlin charm leavened by sly humour, but they also swipe at some less appealing aspects of Brazilian society - slavery and prostitution among them. There is also tenderness: 'Midnight Mass' is a beautiful, almost musical composition about an hour's conversation between a lonely woman, abandoned by her husband for his weekly rendezvous with his lover, and their lodger, a seventeen-year-old lad from the provinces. Nothing happens, but everything does.