The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

By: Joaqium Maria Machado de Assis, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux - translator

Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas.

The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer, but also a writer of world stature who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and halfhearted political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to Calvino and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

©2020 Flora Thompson-DeVeaux (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Absolutely terrific.

Bras Cubas begins telling his life story from the point of view of already having died. Like Barry Lyndon, Bras Cubas is a scoundrel and like Thackeray, Machado refers directly to the reader--however Machado is more fanciful (Bras rides a hippopotamus in the after life that later turns into his cat, Sultan).
Richly funny, witty, and, for all its playfulness, never loses interest in the character's relationships, and is full of insights into human behavior.
It's also, stylistically, THE most modern 19th century novel I think I've ever read. I did a double-take when I saw it was written in 1881. Machado feels like a contemporary of Borges, Cortazar, Marquez, and Fuentes.
I loved it.