New York Times, "Times Critics Top Books of 2020"
"The most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel I read this year
was originally published in 1881. Jull Costa and Patterson offer a
peerless translation of this comic masterpiece." (Parul Sehgal, New
York Times)
Machado de Assis' classic novel, the precursor of Latin American
fiction, is finally rendered as a stunningly relevant work for
21st-century audiences.
"I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in
1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So
begins Machado de Assis' Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, told eerily
from beyond the grave. First appearing in Brazil in 1881, this
remarkably experimental novel was never intended by its author to be a
popular "run-of-the-mill-novel".
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the son of a mulatto father and a
washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves, was not, originally,
expecting literary encomiums in his lifetime, especially not for Brás
Cubas. And yet, his prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories
would influence generations of South American writers. Now, with this
coruscating new translation of one of his most compelling novels,
esteemed translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a
pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became
his literary hallmark.
In eloquent, contemporary prose, Costa and Patterson breathe new life
into the dynamic character of Brás Cubas and reveal the vivid,
tempestuous Rio de Janeiro of his time. The recently deceased Cubas
narrates his life story, admitting glibly: "I am not so much a writer
who has died, as a dead man who has decided to write." His life,
therefore, is relayed out of order, beginning with his funeral, and then
stepping back to offer "a brief genealogical sketch". An enigmatic,
amusing, and frequently insufferable antihero, Cubas describes his
childhood spent tormenting household slaves and meddling cheekily in
adult affairs, through his bachelor years navigating his own torrid
affairs, up to his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices.
Fantastical in structure and enthralling in tone, Posthumous Memoirs of
Brás Cubas is a deeply human story of a somber life - how much of it
reflects the author's own personality we will never know. At once a work
of uproarious mockery and great sympathy, this is Machado de Assis at
his most pathbreaking: an incisive observer of the human condition and a
founding father of modernist fiction.
