The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis

(Duly noted.) He is a writer besotted with the license afforded by fiction. His favorite weapons are irony and charm - although he doesn’t shy from needling readers, especially critics, for their narrowness of taste and fondness for facile interpretation.

These two new translations bring another opportunity to enshrine the singular talent and mischief of this writer, whose late novels are insurrections against the novel itself, against its tendencies toward banal realism and earnest piety. It’s said that each generation rediscovers Machado anew. When he died in 1908, heralded as Brazil’s greatest writer, he was nationally mourned.įor all of his heavyweight champions in the English-speaking world (including Sontag, Philip Roth, John Updike), his standing has been wobbly. He branched into writing theater criticism, newspaper columns, librettos and short stories. A ferocious autodidact, he began publishing poetry in his teens. Machado was born into poverty in 1839, the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves. “To love this book,” Susan Sontag once wrote, “is to become a little less provincial about literature, about literature’s possibilities.” We read not for plot, in the usual sense, but to be close to Brás Cubas, his disarming candor and deeply merited self-disgust, and for the questions he prompts: What is a life, if defined outside of incident and achievement? What is a novel? He is unremittingly pretentious, preening - and superb company. Even his mistresses inspired in him only lukewarm passion and vague pity. His career ambitions were foolhardy and thwarted. What a record of failures! He never married, never fathered children. The story follows the feckless, peerlessly lazy nobleman Brás Cubas as he reflects on his life from beyond the grave. Its formal experimentation and playfulness are regarded as precursors to the novels of Nabokov, Calvino and the American postmodernists. The book draws from the omnivorous taste of its creator: Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Schopenhauer, leavened by the picaresque tradition of Cervantes and Laurence Sterne.

If we imagine the historical progress of the novel like the evolution of man - from a crouching primate to upright homo sapiens - Machado’s book represents the moment when the novel learned to dance.

Too grim? I neglected to mention that he’s being carried into the afterlife on the back of a voluble and enormous hippopotamus. This month sees the arrival of two new translations of “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” the Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ masterpiece, a metafictional, metaphysical tale narrated by a man struck dead by pneumonia. Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881?

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis