The article proposes that Memorial de Aires, Machado de Assis' last novel, has in the social connivance of the narrator its main compositional principle. It attempts to demonstrate that, far from being a work of an absentee novelist, the novel presents a disenchanted view of the Abolition in Brazil - a more profound and lucid one than that of the apologists of the Thirteenth of May.
Machado de Assis; Memorial de Aires; Abolition