Novel with a “particularly tedious and insipid” story (John Gledson), Machado de Assis’ Esau and Jacob is presented, in fact, as a narrative that challenges the reader’s analytic and interpretative capacity, beginning with the “Advertence”, artifice cunningly placed at the entrance of the text, establishing an ambiguity around the categories of real author, “transcriber author” (Oscar Tacca) and narrator, with repercussions in the relation between fiction and history, the central axle of the novel’s intrigue
