The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Epitaph of a Small Winner is worth reading much more for its innovative style than its substance. Machado de Assis manages to make a 19th century novel feel like it could have been written yesterday, and the rapid transition between chapters (there are 160 chapters in 209 pages) keeps things fresh and fun. But man, our narrator's a real doofus.

Braz Cubas, a dead guy who's decided to write his memoirs from beyond the grave, takes a pessimistic view of the world, concluding the book by saying the only positive he can take from his life is that he failed to father a child, thereby declining to increase the suffering in the world. But all of Braz Cubas' "suffering" amounted to a series of minor grievances and failed relationships with women show more he never cared about beyond a superficial level. He was born financially secure and died financially secure through no hard work of his own. I get that the human condition is difficult to handle, but I'm not interested in the complaints of a wealthy narcissist who never made much of an effort to look for happiness beyond creature comforts and boobs.

I guess his thoughts could still change, though. If he can write while he's dead now, I imagine he could alter his thoughts to fit with whatever seems to make sense in the future. As his phiolosophical mentor Quincas Borba said, "The worst philosophy of all is that of the crybaby who lies down at the edge of the river and bewails the incessant flow of the water."

I don't want to rip him too hard anyway, because he can be pretty funny sometimes. Braz Cubas is constantly changing his mind about what he wants to write and will even occasionally write chapters that ask the reader to discount the previous chapter entirely. It's nice of a dead guy to have a sense of humor about things.

Woody Allen loves this book. I wouldn't go that far, but I also wouldn't go as far with my daughter as he has with his, so I feel pretty OK about just liking this one. show less

tempora mutantur

“…time hardens sensibility and obliterates the memory of things. It was to be supposed that the years would dull the thorns, that a removal from the events would smooth the sore spots, that a shadow of retrospective doubt would cover the nakedness of reality.”

This was great, and it’s incredible that this book was published in 1881. Probably the ultimate precursor to the modern novel. This book is composed of short fragments, which are shards of a life retold from beyond the grave. The book’s protagonist looks back on his life, from his perspective as a wealthy bachelor in 19th century Brazil.

Cubas is an imperfect protagonist. Part of his familial inherited wealth comes from slavery, he is a precocious and mean show more child, becomes a romantic as a young man drawn to poetry and art, has a long adulterous affair that lasts for years, has a failed political and publishing career as a middle-aged man, and finally dies, all these episodes infused with philosophical musings on life, love, grief, power and death. According to Cubas:

“Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis.”

This was really good. The proverbial fourth wall is broken and smashed and basically obliterated throughout the book, and hilariously so too. This is the second De Assis book I have read, The Alienist was my first, a more sombre read which was also good, but this is certainly my favourite of the two, and I’ll hopefully be reading more from the writer. show less

This most unique novel is very well known and well regarded in Brazil, but is largely unknown elsewhere. Every once in a while it's "rediscovered" (most recently, due to a new translation) by someone who wonders how a novel from the late 19th century can be so modern.

This is my second reading (first time was back in high school), and it remains one of the most hilarious, most radical and most puzzling (in a good way) novels I've read. Like Pale Fire, which I read earlier this year, it plays so much with the form of the novel that it's hard to say what the novel is. It could be called postmodern, except it's not recent enough for that.

Part of it is a straightforward love story; part of it is social critique, and part of it is about show more philosophy and the human condition. The structure of the novel consists of hundreds of very short chapters, which means that it's constantly switching gears. Despite that the author of the memoirs is supposed to be dead, which means that he's not bound by time constraints or fear of public opinion, which would allow him to write an honest history of his life, his writing is full of twists and turns, never settling into a conventional narrative.

It's so full of energy that it's not surprising that people think of it as very current. It doesn't feel like a 19th century novel at all. Although, it might show a bit of age in the references it makes--and the book makes many, both to itself and to other literary works: a lot of them are references to 18th and 19th century works that might not be familiar to modern readers. (Some of them were not familiar to me, to be sure.) Otherwise it's as current as ever. show less

The reader, like his fellows, doubtless prefers action to reflection, and doubtless he is wholly in the right. So we shall get to it. However, I must advise that this book is written leisurely, with the leisureliness of a man no longer troubled by the flight of time; that is a work supinely philosophical, but of a philosophy wanting in uniformity, now austere, now playful, a thing that neither edifies nor destroys, neither inflames nor chills, and that is at once more of a pastime and less than a preachment.

The more I read, the more I come to understand that the trait I admire most in authors is not so much a matter of elegant prose, complex plots, characters that leap off the pages and make their home in your heads when the last page show more has been turned and the story has ended. Those are all very entertaining in their own right, but clever is as clever does, and rarely provokes long-lasting admiration in my mind. What I prefer is a simple matter of trust, belief, faith even if that is the direction your theological tendencies swing. Faith of the author in themselves, but more importantly, enough faith in their audience to lead them without expounding, carry them along in the pages without tending to their every need and pandering to their every expectation.

Some would disagree with me on that point. In fact, many would, all those folks who dislike books for "trying too hard" and "being too smart". Those who feel that the author did not adhere to the formula enough to guarantee formulaic enjoyment of the audience, and decry them for leading them out of their literary comfort zones and making them confront a strange beast of ink and paper. Oftentimes they look at this weird creature and see something of themselves inside it. Sometimes this bothers them. More frequently than you'd expect, this scares them.

So what does this have to do with this book here, you ask? Good question. I haven't quite figured it out myself, actually. At least, not at this exact point in time, as I type down these words in the middle of a coffee shop, the book itself on my right and a list of its quotes on the left. That's why you're here. You're joining me on this journey, the goal of which is to find the purpose of conducting in the first place. Circular, no? But true.

What this book achieves is an astounding thing in this current age, but even moreso when one takes into account the year of publication. 1880, two years after The Brothers Karamazov and four years before The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you asked me which is more closely related to this particular specimen, I'd have to say TBK. But only in terms of the wealth of philosophical content, the exacting and measured analysis of the human condition, the grappling with questions of success, reputation, and mortality. TBK tells you a story in a sonorous tone, preaches from the pulpit of its well-deserved yet greatly intimidating authorial presence. This book hops up on the stand, poses with hand on hip, says a few words in a serious tone, then quickly hops down and invites you to the back table to ruminate and reminisce over a few choice bottles of the finest vintages. There is a man behind the curtain, and he doesn't bother to pretend that he doesn't know that you know that he knows it's there. Instead, he welcomes you into his humble abode, and asks if you wish to hear a story. And trust me, reader, you really should say yes.

Why? Why do we want to hear this story from this author, one who breaks off from all conventions in serving us what cannot at all be deemed a novel? One hundred and sixty bits and pieces of one, perhaps, but how could that possibly flow as strongly and as soothingly as a single entity, one that admittedly breaks off into chapters but ensures that each chapter is a well-rounded stepping stone to the next? Instead, we have this book, whose sections sometimes contain no more than a paragraph, a single sentence, even at some point a series of dots (or ellipses? Impossible to tell). How can a story possibly be told in such an erratic and incomprehensible fashion?

Through conscientious and deliberate interaction of the author with his audience, who predicts their interests and invites them to go beyond it. Through knowledgeable understatement, conveying through simple events powerful ideas on life, love, and the death that the author supposedly composes in, without once feeling the need to paint an obvious map for the reader to jerk themselves around on. Through a measured and insightful eye on the actions of the main character, creating a man that dwells on deep thoughts without realization and dismisses them for frivolities and pleasure, yet is incontrovertibly shaped by the powerful undertow. A man who is both infuriatingly obtuse and startlingly sensitive, capable of great cruelty and great understanding. A man who lived without effort, and died before making an effort. A man, now dead, writing of a life that he felt was lived without achieving any measure of great suffering, or amount of great joy.

Perhaps he never did acquire those things he longed for so long in life. He did, however, find one thing: a small amount of truth in his life, one that reconciled his mortality with his visions of success, and contented him with living in constant and clear-sighted observation of himself and of others. The character may have never realized the beauty of his thoughts, the wonderful philosophies he drew from a privileged, yet empty living. I believe, however, that the author trusted us enough to discover those for ourselves. However much he played with us during the course of the pages, flattering our sensibilities while baffling our literary conventions, he trusted us to go through his pages and discover something on our own, for our own. That something, however small, is worth everything. show less

As usual, our fearless Reading Group leader came up with a book no one had heard of and was glad to read.

This sometimes satiric, sometimes hilarious novel is written by the title character from the grave - literally. He dedicates it to the worms that will eat his body. Its main preoccupation is Bras Cubas himself, an upper class, lazy, amoral gentleman in Rio de Janiero in the late 1800s, his life and loves, his acute perceptions of the society around him and the history of this very mixed race place. Some of the chapters are reasonably long - maybe 8 pages. Some are just one page. One is empty. The titles are signals, for instance, 'An Immoral Reflection', 'Sad, but Short', followed by 'Short, but Happy'. But Blas being dead, he has show more decided to tell it like it was, warts and and slavery and all. As a picture of a petty, scrupulous, self-absorbed society, it's terrific. (Look out for the hippopotamus in chapter VII.)

There are at least three translations out, one from the 1950s, two more recent. They are all good. The one I read had extensive footnotes from the author. Interestingly, the book was not well received in Brazil, at least in part because it is such a strange departure from the previous writing, the straight narrative romances that were so popular. But it has haunted many writers in English, and speaks as much to the 21st century as to its own. show less

The fictional memoir of a wastrel asshole of a 19th-century Brazilian aristocrat which in terms of style reads startlingly ahead of its time. For me, the main pleasure of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas lay in the eponymous character's voice, which is at once ironic and capricious, insightful and self-deluded. I found this fitfully engaging—passages of brilliance succeeded by sections of tedium—and the whole perhaps a little less than the sum of its parts.

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 show more number of books (not to mention his stories) still ahead of me. A distinctive voice, that’s for sure. show less