My first book

26 Apr, 2026

I was watching a video about how in a certain telenovela, all the books one of the characters would read had some correlation to the plot. Among them was O Alienista, by Machado de Assis. I love this book, it was my first classical reading and therefore has a special place in my heart. So I decided to talk a little about it.

Yes, yes, it was my first classical book, not my first book, but I think this title sounds nicer.

Anyway. The book. What is it about?

Simão Bacamarte is one of the greatest doctors of his time. Holding great prestige in Brasil and Portugal. However, as a man of science, he decides to dedicate himself to the (at the time) unexplored area of medicine. The mind. For that, he returns from Europe to Brasil and creates the Green House, a place where he could study and treat people afflicted with madness. But in a such a vast and untouched field, how does one know where madness starts and human nature ends?

The first time I read it, I didn’t understand much. Mostly because of the complicated words. After reading more books and aging enough to not get bored after five pages, I came to appreciate it. The writing is not as bad as I remembered, it’s actually a light reading if compared with other classics I had to read in school.

The concept is very interesting. For us, psychology has always been a thing, but in 1882¹ (the year this book was published), it wasn’t exactly widespread. It actually has some descriptions about how mentally ill people were treated at the time. Mostly hidden at home, most of the time in a faraway room. Far away from people.

I don’t want to give spoilers. I super recommend the book, and it is kind of short. The edition my school gave us has about 100 pages, with a lot of footnotes about difficult words for 6th graders and some context of the time period. 

One of the things I like is the initial explorations of what, in this book, is a new area of science. My mind as a child never questioned the nonexistence of psychology in the story, I just accepted it. But now I got curious and discovered psychiatry was only recognized as its own field, separated from philosophy, in 1879, in Germany. Only three before O Alienista was published.

The author, Machado, is one of our bigger treasures. One of the most famous and acclaimed black authors in the world. All his works are classics worth reading. My school provided us with some, like O Alienista, A Mão e a Luva, and Dom Casmurro. Sadly we didn’t read Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, maybe because I’m pretty sure there's a prostitute as a plot point and they didn’t think it was appropriate for us. What is funny, because we had to read A Viuvinha, whose plot is (vaguely) about a guy trying to kill himself, being stopped, and then faking his suicide.

That is it. Go look up his books, he also wrote a lot of very good short-stories. They’re also worth looking for. If you have already read the book or another one of his, I would love to know your thoughts.

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#Books #Childhood