Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

“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 Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas—at the end of the narrator’s life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis’ definitive work—a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding “good riddance” to the critic looking for a “run-of-the-mill-novel.” An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable antihero, Brás Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs, and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices.

A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Brás Cubas shines a direct light on Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.