Brás Cubas’s hopes of wedding Virgilia, which would have led to a seat in the Brazilian legislature, falls apart when another motivated bachelor swoops in and marries her. Upon returning from a “profligate, superficial, riotous” life in a European university, he reluctantly agrees to his father’s request that he start a fruitful relationship with a woman named Virgilia, the daughter of an important politician. He is shipped to Lisbon for school after his father discovers that Brás Cubas had been stealing money to seduce a girl with jewelry.

At the end of his life, such is his detachment from the world that he decides to dedicate his memoirs not to any person, but to the first worm to gnaw the cold flesh of his corpse.īrás Cubas narrates the events of his anticlimactic life with a humor that makes it hard to suppress a laugh. He falls in love a few times, but he doesn’t get to marry or start a family. However, success and security elude him all his life. Brás Cubas was born wealthy with high expectations. This vantage point allows Brás Cubas to talk about his life with the kind of blithe irony and callousness only accessible to those who have nothing to lose or gain. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas builds on a macabre conceit-Brás Cubas, already dead, is recounting his adventures from beyond the grave. Harold Bloom declared him “the supreme black literary artist to date.” If it wasn’t for such influential admirers who tried to draw attention to his fading image, Machado de Assis’s name would have disappeared into oblivion long ago. Susan Sontag wrote an essay hailing him as the greatest writer to emerge out of Latin America.

Even Jorge Luis Borges, another genius from Latin America with a reputation for his expansive reading, never mentions Machado de Assis. His eminent stature in Brazilian literature makes it all the more surprising that he is virtually unknown in the rest of the Americas. His statue adorns the entrance to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which he founded in 1897. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is hugely popular in Brazil. When first published in 1881, the book breathed new life into Brazilian literature. One of his most celebrated works, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is being rejuvenated this summer with a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. His books not only feel evergreen, but they also seem to anticipate the taste of a reader from a century and a half later. Machado de Assis’s books, however, are not like that. When you pick up a book from the late nineteenth century, you might prepare yourself to read a musty language that has aged so much it feels otherworldly.

The posthumous memoirs of bras cubas