Claire Williams

speaker

137 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Claire Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Machado de Assis · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

So sometimes I read Memorius Pastumus as a kind of parenting manual, how not to be, how not to bring up your children.

Do impose discipline.

And then also Don Cashmoo, who is a kind of

Marriage counselling can be read as a kind of marriage counselling guide, so it's very up-to-date in the topics that it's dealing with.

And then I very much enjoy texts where the reader has to participate.

Machado's novels are full of gaps and holes and clues which the reader has to put together.

Once we realise that the narrator is a narrator, that he's not the author...

we have to deal with that sort of gap, the fact that there are different versions of reality being portrayed here.

And we also realise that the narrators have their own agenda.

So, for example, in Don Kajmuhu,

Bento is trying to prove throughout the novel that, in fact, that Capitou is guilty.

And you can read it, if you're on Capitou's side, that she's innocent.

Just some other things that I really enjoy and my students have enjoyed.

The fact that he's very entertaining.

The texts are full of jokes.

They're full of typographical quirks, as Viv was mentioning before.

There's a chapter called The Age-Old Dialogue of Adam and Eve in the posthumous memoirs, which there are no words.

There are ellipses and there is punctuation.

And you can tell from the number of question marks and exclamation marks that this is an argument between lovers.

So we become part of the storytelling process and we search for these clues and gaps and Easter eggs as well, like Easter eggs that they have in films where he makes a reference to a particular place or a quotation, which we then go and follow up and find out what extra information that adds to the story.

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