The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis

Chapters and approaches never overstay their welcome – most are no longer than a page.

Not for nothing does Brás Cubas refer to his book and style as akin to “a pair of drunkards” staggering down a street. His preface is wonderfully short because that’s the best way to “win the sympathy of… popular opinion”, and he regularly suggests that if we don’t like the book we can simply get rid of it – “the main problem with this book is you, the reader”.Īlthough the story of Brás Cubas’s life is told in a fragmentary, if realist, style, these chapters are then further broken up by more philosophical ones, including a selection of our narrator’s finest aphorisms, and comments on the construction of the book itself. He is always talking to us, advising us, telling us what we think.

What I mean is that the text knows it is a text: there are chapters that ask to be deleted, chapters that ask to be inserted elsewhere, and the reader is a regular partner in Brás Cubas’s narration. Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written in a style that is self-consciously imitative of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, but with an additional “harsh, bitter sentiment” – a kind of pessimism about human nature. But how wonderfully is all that story told! Style And what was Brás Cubas’s life? An affair, bachelorhood, and some politics. As a result, there are two layers of irony here – first Brás Cubas ironises his world, and then the author ironises Brás Cubas. Instead, Brás Cubas gains just enough perspective to criticise the world, but not enough to properly criticise himself. Being dead allows him a certain degree of perspective on his life, but this is not the dramatic perspective of, say, the dying Ivan Ilyich, who realises that his entire world was a dreadful bourgeois lie.

The novel is the life story of the titular Brás Cubas, written by himself from beyond the grave, where he lies festering. It is short and immensely readable thanks to its equally short chapters it is funny it has an interesting narrative approach and it tells a story whose messages remain valid a hundred years later – and will remain valid, I don’t doubt, for many hundreds of years yet. There are many reasons for having a go with this book.

Also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner, I read Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in the recent translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, though there is also a new Penguin translation too. When I asked my director of studies for recommendations for South American literature – beyond the usual suspects – she named various people, but when she mentioned Machado and this novel specifically, she spoke with such passion that I really had no excuse not to go out and get a copy. A Brazilian and grandson of slaves, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is probably the most important Portuguese-language writer of the past two-hundred years.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis