The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. 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.
By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás 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. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it. Newly translated by Gregory Rabassa and superbly edited by Enylton de Sá Rego and Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, this Library of Latin America edition brings to English-speaking readers a literary delight of the highest order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Br s Cubas, whose lone achievement in life has been as inventor of an antihypochondriacal miracle cure. 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. 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. Educated at great expense in Portugal, Cubas fails to live up to early promise as a government minister in Rio de Janeiro. After his betrothed Virgilia is snatched away by a rival, Cubas settles for the life of a libertine. 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. 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"). His masterpiece reads like the best of dreams.
