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Loading... Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: A Novel (original 1881; edition 2021)by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator), Robin Patterson (Translator)
Work InformationThe Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis (1881)
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I wonder: is he as obsessed with aging and death as he appears to be? Reading this after Dom Casmurro makes me wonder. I read the translation by William Grossman made in the 1950s: the first translation of Machado de Assis into English. It takes a little getting used to and I’m not sure whether I would have preferred Jull Costa’s brand-new one. That said, I found the end a bit…deflating. I have to admit that the book--generally acknowledged as one of his masterpieces--fell a bit short for me. I enjoy reading him for his observations, especially on relationships between people, but the end just didn't impress me...sorta the same way I felt about Dom Casmurro. Not sure which of his works I will take on next, but I’m glad I have a number of books (not to mention his stories) still ahead of me. A distinctive voice, that’s for sure.
This new translation, by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, is the perfect chance to get reacquainted with the delights of a book written with “the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy”, or to discover it for the first time. Notable Lists
"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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)869.3Literature Spanish and Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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…this is what makes us the lords of the Earth, this ability to restore the past, to realize the fragility of our impressions and the futility of our affections. Pascal may say that man is a thinking reed, but he isn’t, he’s a thinking erratum. Each season in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one, which will in turn be corrected again, until we reach the definitive edition, which the editor donates for free to the worms.