His masterpiece reads like the best of dreams. Thomson-DeVeaux’s limpid translation captures the charm and immediacy of de Assis (1839–1908), who seduces with short bursts of playful autobiography and bursts of exclamation (“Oh! There goes my pen, slipping over into the emphatic”). Matched in his mental peregrinations only by his lifelong friend, the philosopher of misery Quincas Borba, Cubas endows every episode with scintillating digressions on history and literature along with gentle mockery of his own hypocrisy and pretensions. After his betrothed Virgilia is snatched away by a rival, Cubas settles for the life of a libertine. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas a book by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis and Flora Thomson-Deveaux 25,232,227.53 raised for local bookstores The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis (Author) Flora Thomson-Deveaux (Translator) FORMAT Paperback 17.00 15.81 MP3 CD 24.99 23. In pursuit of love and progeny, Cubas rejects the women who want him and aspires to the ones who reject him.
Educated at great expense in Portugal, Cubas fails to live up to early promise as a government minister in Rio de Janeiro. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brs Cubas is written as an autobiography, a chronicle of the erotic misadventures of its narrator, Brs Cubas-who happens to be dead. Now freed from consequence and public embarrassment, he sees fit to begin his memoirs, making a study of his lifelong indolence, dilettantism, and squandered genius. As the novel opens, Cubas dies from pneumonia at the age of 64 and is ferried to the afterlife on the back of a giant hippopotamus. Newly translated by Gregory Rabassa and superbly edited by Enylton de Sa Rego and Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, this Library of Latin America edition brings to English-speaking readers a literary delight of the highest order.Machado de Assis’s brilliantly idiosyncratic 19th-century Brazilian classic stands alongside Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy as it follows the travails of self-described wastrel and mediocrity Brás Cubas, whose lone achievement in life has been as inventor of an antihypochondriacal miracle cure.
It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.īy turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave.
"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.
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