Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis (May 2017)
This 1880 Brazilian classic came my way via recommendation from a reader. The comment accompanying the book was along the lines of 'this book reminded me of your blog'. Such statements tend to be true on average (!), of course, but the thought was accurate. Throughout this read, I saw many examples of what I consider the hallmarks of TOA: extended digressions, needless self-references, and deep reflections into the mundane details of daily living. But let us not get distracted by reminiscing...
One book this novel reminded me of was Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story, a book I've written a little bit about in the past. I suppose if Madden had read Epitaph... in his formative years, he could have included the premise of this book (pretend you died, then wrote a memoir) to bring his storytelling methods up to a round one hundred.
Reading Epitaph of a Small Winner forced me into thinking once more about how I've structured this blog. At the time of reading, TOA was more a collection of essays than a true blog. I decided over the course of a few weeks to adjust the tempo and focus on shorter posts. Of the many different factors going into the decision, this book was among the foremost of them.
