Esau and Jacob (novel)

Esau and Jacob (Portuguese:Esaú e Jacó) is a Machado de Assis novel launched in 1904, four years before his death, by Editora Garnier, and, according to most critics, in full literary heyday, after writing, in 1899, Dom Casmurro, the most famous from his books.

Machado takes advantage of the occasional eccentricity in a text that leaves behind traces of picaresque and embarks on a realism that resumes the melancholy and lyricism that had begun in the first phase of his literary production.

They disagree in politics, in life, always in opposite fields, against each other, since Paulo is a republican and enters law school, while Pedro is a monarchist and is studying medicine, but they even court the same woman who is indecisive between them.

It is in the narrative of Esaú and Jacó, however, that the Wizard of Cosme Velho goes deep in the criticism of the country's political conformation, denouncing the set of interests that preceded the proclamation of the republic in Brazil.

At the time, the discoveries of experimental science, the advent of materialism and the redefinition of man ended up causing a sense of disenchantment, instilling desperate skepticism.

It can be inferred that, between the spaces of belief (the cabocla shack and the church), spiritism is placed in the figure of Plácido, as an attempt to establish the union between faith and science, which, due to the emptiness of their positions, does not is achieved.

Pay attention to how Machado composes Pedro and Paulo in this perspective, different, but analogous, and how, in this game of contradictions, Flora, Brazil's metonymy, gets confused and languishes.