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"One of the wittiest, most playful, and . . . most alive and ageless books ever written." --Dave Eggers, The New Yorker A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas A Penguin Classic 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 Ginsberg, 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 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 ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to Calvino, and 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. Unlike other editions, it also preserves Machado's original chapter breaks--each of the novel's 160 short chapters begins on a new page--and includes excerpts from previous versions of the novel never before published in English.… (more)
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I was less impressed with the stylistic trickery (and enough has been said about that, just read the other Goodreads reviews)
The story is basically one of impotence and mediocrity. Bras Cubas makes headway halfheartedly in all arenas of life, never fully achieving anything in the conventional sense that society deems as such. Though he was always at the brink of each of these accomplishments, he never acheives them: marriage, children, illustrious career. And we're better off for it, as readers, because we see that Bras Cubas really doesn't care for these societal expectations, much like this book doesn't care for fulfilling the narrative expectations of its readers.
The book mirrors this mindframe: it goes in a million different directions, imparting various observations along the way without any kind of central thrust. I don't mean this in a bad way; in fact, its aimlessness is one of the things I liked most about it. There's an openness to it where it doesn't feel too controlled, too one-minded, and this is refreshing.
On the negative side, it never feels completely satisfying either. There are moments of deep insight, and moments of humor, but a kind of constant withdrawal where it never reaches the heights of either. The wording was sometimes clunky too, but this could have been due to the translation. Also, the narrative devices he employs should be nothing new or shocking to a reader in the year 2011, though at the time I can see how it was. But since I'm reading it now and not in 1880, I felt a little annoyed that I was constantly expected to react to certain sections as if I were a maiden aunt (to borrow a phrasing from Manny) scandalized by its unconventional sexy form. To its credit, the cleverness is totally in line with the character's voice, so it didn't feel tacked-on, just slightly tacky in this day and age.
PS - the preface by Enylton de Sa Rego is complete rubbish. Skip it. I haven't finished reading the Afterword by Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, but so far it's kinda rubbish too.
The narrator is a self-declared failure whose fiancée drops him for a more successful politician (Lobo Neves, who refuses a governorship because the grant was written on a date he considers unlucky), who never achieves his ambition of becoming a minister of state, who dies a bachelor after a series of humiliating or otherwise disastrous love affairs, and who shows himself incapable of getting beyond his selfishness at every point. His defense is a blanket condemnation of the world he milked for every pleasure it offered, as he congratulates himself for having no progeny to leave “the legacy of our misery.”
Machado lacks the playfulness of Sterne or de Maistre. He does do a job on the expectations of both romantic and realistic fiction, but perhaps only within a regional theatre. He can also claim to have a head start on magical realism. But his character’s autobiography is largely dreary.
The story unfolds with plenty of irony and caustic wit, after all he is a corpse with nothing to gain or lose from the telling. Bras Cubas was born wealthy and with high expectations, but success eluded him all his life. He never marries, and his biggest disappointment seemed to be that he didn’t leave any children behind. He tells his story over the course of 160 short chapters, revealing incidents from his life that gives the reader insight and knowledge of his character. At times he interrupts his story to make snide comments or observations directly to the reader about the human experience.
Although it felt rather experimental in nature, I quite enjoyed The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. The author provided an interesting, slightly odd story, anchored in the history of the day that both amused and educated me. This has the feeling of a timeless classic due to his fresh writing style and witty observations.