POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS LLA (Library of Latin America)

I sometimes wonder why a reviewer will trash a book in the presence of so many positive reviews. Maybe there are readers out there who just like to be contrarians for the sake of being contrarians. How dull. This book is so good, I wrote my college thesis on it. I cannot count the number of times I have read it over the years. Why all the fuss? First, I suppose in 2001 this book might seem tame and trite. Joyce, Proust, Mann, Faulkner, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, Pynchon, etc have already come and gone. Now days, it might seem totally uninteresting for a dead person to narrate a book, or for the author to purposely lie and mislead the reader, and for those readers who like their books "Serious" it might be annoying for the narrator to crack jokes, make fun of everyone, and otherwise disrupt the whole solemnity of reading a "great book." Bah humbug! This book was published in 1881, when the continentals were all reading and imitating Zola and the English speakers were all reading and imitating Henry James. This book amazingly snubs the whole "realist-naturalist" aesthetic. Why can't the narrator be a liar? Why does the narrator have to "show not tell?" From a historical point of view, Machado de Assis is impressively original and independent in his style, obviously influenced by those innocent and flabby 18th century English novels by Fielding and Sterne. But for those who inspect closely, there is even an amazing amount of social criticism going on in this book: Roberto Schwartz, a Brazilian critic, has analyzed Machado de Assis's books as social criticism extensively. For the interested, his writings might be worth a peak. Finally, after having been forced to view "literature" as a serious, high-brow concern my whole life, this book was a refreshing read: finally a relaxed, funny, light read that didn't stoop to be base, shallow, are insulting at the same time. At an age when I desperately needed to be reminded of it, this book reminded me that we read to be entertained. And the best books are those that entertain over and over again without going stale. The worst books are those that come across as stale on the first read. Amazingly, a lot of books that I was trying to read because they were on my college professors' "great books" lists now strike me as amazingly stale. This book continues to entertain, however.

"The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" is a landmark of 19th century Brazilian fiction. The original Portuguese version by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been rendered into an engaging English by translator Gregory Rabassa.

The book's hero, Bras Cubas, is a sort of lovable loser who narrates his own life from beyond the grave. The book is divided up into 160 short chapters, some less than a page long. As the story unfolds we meet a colorful cast of characters: Bras Cubas himself, his beloved Virgilia, the slave Prudencio, the strange philosopher Quincas Borba, and many more.

Throughout the novel, Machado de Assis (through his fictional narrator) continually plays games with the conventions of fiction and autobiography. Whether he is instructing the reader to insert Chapter CXXX "between the first and second sentences of Chapter CXXIX" or critiquing his own writing style, Cubas/Machado de Assis is full of surprises that make this novel a literary house of mirrors.

And throughout the novel the reader encounters passages of poetic depth and psychological insight. Despite being more than 100 years old, this book has an amazingly modern feel to it. This is a major work in the great tradition of South American fiction.

This excellent and extremely original novel marked the transition from Romanticism to an authentically Brazilian literature. Written in very short chapters, it is the autobiography dictated from his grave, of a wealthy bachelor, his love affairs, his rompy relationship with his family, his friendship with the extravagant philosopher Quincas Borba (the subject of another novel), his political ambitions and delusions and his -very- particular view of the world. The style is concise, sarcastic, hilarious, cynical and he's constantly sustaining a dialogue with the reader. In a way, it is a novel rewritten in every read, since it seems to be written by the author AND the reader.

This novel accurately portrays the enivronment of upper classes in Rio de Janeiro in the middle XIX century. But note that, despite being funny and comical, in the background there is always a tone of sadness and pessimism. It is an intelligent, bittersweet and excellent work of literary art. Read it and you'll be much rewarded.

Although most people identify Brazilian literature with the vivid regionalism of Jorge Amado or (more recently) the mystical blabber of Paulo Coelho, Brazilian critics have long hailed Machado de Assis as the country's greatest writer and with good reason. This book is vivid proof of Machado's genius: deeply perceptive of human nature as in much of his work, but also radically innovative in style, displaying many traces of modernism some 30 - 40 years ahead of time. How else to characterize the chapter on the "Ancient Dialogue between Adam and Eve" (LV), written solely with punctuation? Or the one-sentence "useless" chapter (CXXXVI): "Unless I'm very much mistaken, I've just written an utterly useless chapter." The style is not without substance. Machado's trenchant insights on human nature and unabashed social criticism are brilliantly displayed in this work.

Machado's own view of the book was that it was too serious and deep for the frivolous and too playful and radical for the erudite readers of the time, and concluded in his usual pessimism that it would have "perhaps five" readers. Since the book continues to accumulate "fives and fives" of readers, perhaps humankind, like the flawed Brás Cubas, is also a "small winner" after all.

Factoid about the chapter size: As other reviewers noted, the book has numerous short chapters. One chief reason for this was that Machado was afflicted by epileptic attacks and could not write for extended periods.

I cannot understand the review that claims not to have found a single interesting paragraph in a book that is dedicated to "The worm that first ate of my corpse's cold meat." Though I haven't read the translation, the book itself is one of the best ever written. It is also, for its very uniqueness, a must for anyone attempting to understand the literature and culture of Brazil, not only at the start of the XX century, but also at the turn of the XXI.