Figuras da queda no deserto do ‘real’: os romances do Conselheiro e as ruínas do tempo

The article seeks to articulate a mapping, among the many possible ones, of the so-called “last Machado”, author of the “Conselheiro Aires cycle”, conceived and realized as the culmination of an incredible literary project. Despite many relevant interpretative efforts, also in recent times, the challenge that Machado de Assis launches through the two novels, Esaú e Jacó and Memorial de Aires, especially the dense entangle of relationships that in a calculated and acutely thought out novelistic architecture establishes (where the strong metaphor of chess stands out) allows us to formulate other interpretative hypotheses to be explored, valorizing the inexhaustible source of critical problems implied by the novels. The juxtaposition between the two books and an almost contemporary essay by Georg Simmel on ruins - a constitutive figure of Machado's work as a whole, referred to the destructive onslaught of modernization – creates the conditions to open a new field for an attentive strategy of reusing pasts and save figures and worlds of an old Brazil at sunset.