It is worth reading Machado de Assis because he tells stories about vanity, self-interest, jealousy, and the fear of losing one's place that remain recognizable, and he tells them in a voice unlike that of other authors. Many consider him the greatest Brazilian writer of all time, and scholars place him among the great novelists and short-story writers of the world.
Writers and critics from outside Brazil have praised him: the critic Harold Bloom included him among the hundred greatest geniuses of literature, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, and Woody Allen expressed enthusiasm for his fiction, and Susan Sontag defended his reputation. He influenced authors such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Graciliano Ramos, in Brazil, and the Portuguese writer José Saramago.
There is also a historical reason. According to Sidney Chalhoub, the civil servant and the writer shared a critical view of the slaveholding elite, and Machado's work, from Helena to Dom Casmurro, follows the crisis of paternalism in the Empire. All this comes from someone who, according to Professor Maria Augusta da Costa Vieira (USP), never left the country, not even his own state.
Those who have never read him can begin with a story, such as The Psychiatrist or Midnight Mass, or with The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in which a dead man narrates his own life and treats the reader with ease.
On Clavis: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba.