BOOKS:

I had never read anything by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis until a friend gave me an English copy of “The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas,” or as it is sometimes called, “the Epitaph of a Small Winner.” Written in 1881, “Bras Cubas” is quirky in style, especially for a novel written in the 1800s, but it sure packs a philosophic punch and by the end of the novel you know you have read one of the greatest of novelists. de Assis drew his inspiration from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and structured the philosophy of the main character Bras Cubas on Schopenhauer’s, “The World as Will and Representation.” Schopenhauer had the philosophy that a person’s emotional, physical and sexual desires could never be fulfilled. Sound pessimistic? Well Bras Cubas felt basically the same way. Bras Cubas, already dead at the beginning of the novel, dedicates his book to the first worm that “gnawed on the cold flesh of his corpse.” This is a posthumously composed memoir! Then the novel takes an unlikely leap back in time and the narrative picks up from there. De Assis’s carries this structure of the book off with consummate skill. Bras Cubas says at the beginning that he has a “trapeze in his brain” and that’s how his mind contemplates, with great leaps and bounds. Indeed it does__ but what pessimistic but, delightful leaps and bounds. At one point he tells the reader to insert Chapter 30 between the first and second sentences of Chapter 29. Through de Assis’s odd style and unique perspective emerges a finely tuned narrative of wit, satire and subtle story telling. I’m sure the story written in the original Portuguese is even better. The story is about a man who does essentially nothing for 64 years. Know some people like that? He doesn’t work, he doesn’t study or marry. He fails at everything and then he dies. And finally he’s glad he never had children so he doesn’t have to pass his misery on. Wow. This is all actually a subtle criticism of the Brazilian upper class of the time_ indolent and intellectually dishonest__ a comic lambasting of colonel Brazil. There is an amazing amount of social criticism here.“The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas,” is clever writing at its best, full of inverted parody and ingenious metaphors. Machado de Assis influenced just about all of the great Brazilian writers that followed him: including João Guimaraes Rosa, Jorge Amado, and Rachel de Queiroz. For English readers Gregory Rabassa’s, 1998 English translation for Oxford Press is the one to get. Oh did I mention that chapter 139 is only nine lines long.