no estoy seguro que pensar del libro. supongo que se me hace dificil ver sus meritos -que definitivamente tiene- por que venia precedido de una reputacion superlativa que le queda un poco grande. tambien supongo que para entenderlo bien habria que leer quincas borbas. es un libro muy ameno, una voz muy agradable. la actitud del autor se siente bien moderna, muy contemporanea y eso impresiona considerando cuando fue escrito. el libro es medio formless. parece que se va a tratar del adulterio pero al fin y al cabo no es de eso. el final se sintio abrupto y eso me agrado. me temia que iba a tratar dejar todo bien arreglado y explicado. esa desfachatez tiene algo de voluntariosa. muy independiente. no se. no puedo dejar de pensar que al fin y al cabo es un libro "light", una curiosidad literaria. quizas es que no lo entendi bien. me estuvo interesante como periodos completos de la vida no se contaban. hay algo que me suena verdadero en eso. como si una vision panoramica de la vida fuese asi. ( )

THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRAS CUBAS by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, also translated as EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER, is a Brazilian classic. The book is told in the voice of Bras Cubas, who unfortunately for him, is now dead. Funny and profound are these reflections and musings of a man from beyond the grave. ( )

“… I could not help comparing once more the man of today with the boy I had known; nor could I help facing the abyss that separates the expectations of one day from the realities of another…”

Are biographies, written by an outsider, ever truly correct? Can that writer document the life of another without his thoughts, biases, seeping into the work, tainting the course of the other ever so slightly? Or, is it even possible for an autobiography to be written when the life of that author is not yet over? I don’t think Machado de Assis concerned himself with such frivolous thoughts when he created the fictional character of Braz Cubas, so I won’t either. Cubas was a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian who examines his life from beyond the grave. Braz was, as his father so lovingly accused, a rascal… “Oh, you little rascal! You little rascal!”

This was a fun book that had me laughing one moment and contemplating the tip of my nose the next and if you've never contemplated the tip of your nose you'd better start now because, baby, that's what life is all about. And after just finishing Sebald’s Austerlitz, a book that relies on the comma and period and space and shuns the paragraph and chapter, this book came as a shock containing 160 chapters with only 210 pages. Austerlitz I could not put down because of lack of breaks in the narrative, Epitaph of a Small Winner was nearly impossible to put aside because of the quantity and length of each chapter. Like M&M’s, they’re small, taste good, and before you know it the bag is empty.

And if you do go out and look for this book, be sure to get a copy with Susan Sontag’s forward. That forward (printed in the New Yorker) is worth the price alone. (from forward: Machado de Assis’s novel belongs in that tradition of narrative buffoonery - the talkative first-person voice attempting to ingratiate itself with readers which runs from Sterne through, in our own century, Natsume Soseki’s I Am a Cat, the short fiction of Robert Walser, Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and As a Man Grow Older, Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, much of Beckett.)

There are many gems in this book, here's some gem dust...

“I was a child with manly ways or a man with childish ways. At all events, I was a handsome lad, handsome and bold, and I galloped into life in my boots and spurs, a whip in my hand and blood in my veins, riding a nervous, strong, high-spirited courser like the horse in the old ballads, which Romanticism found in the medieval castle and left in the streets of our own century. The Romanticists rode the poor beast until he was so nearly dead that he finally lay down in the gutter, where the realists found him, his flesh eaten away by sores and worms, and, out of pity, carried him away to their books.”

“Chapter 136. Unnecessary: And, if I am not greatly mistaken, I have just written an utterly unnecessary chapter.

Chapter 137. The Shako: No, I am wrong,, for it sums up the thoughts that I expressed the next day to Quincas Borba…” ( )

Neat trick: Machado de Assis has his hero tell his life story after he is dead. Lots of twists and turns; lively and entertaining. ( )

http://humdingerbooklist.blogspot.com... ( )