Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis

"I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas--at the end of the narrator's life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis' definitive work--a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel." Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Brás Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs, and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Brás Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.

A Novel

Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

"A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest black authors in the Americas. The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsburg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and, in 160 brief chapters, tells of his failed romances and halfhearted political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and utterly unforgettable, it is a novel ahead of its time that has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Borges to Joyce to Nabokov to Calvino, and that has influenced generations of writers around the world. This new English translation is the first to include extensive notes providing crucial historical and cultural context and also includes excerpts from previous versions of the novel never before published in English"--

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

A fictional person's honest view of the life he was put in. I expected a bit more magical elements because of the start, I liked that part so I was sad that it wasn't present in any other part of the book. The chapter gimmicks are just there for the flavor, it's nice that they were present in such an old book.

Nota

Eduarda

Now considered a progenitor of South American fiction, Machado de Assis's highly experimental novel is finally rendered as a stunningly contemporary work. Narrating from beyond the grave, Brás Cubas--an enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable antihero--describes his childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs, and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. "Rejuvenated" (Pradeep Niroula, Chicago Review of Books) by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson's fresh new translation, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a work of acerbic mockery and deep pathos that offers a bird's-eye view of how Machado de Assis launched the canon of modernist fiction."Sprinkled with epigrams, dreams, gags and asides, the story teases, dances and delights."--Economist

Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas A Novel

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