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"Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" is a masterpiece of Brazilian literature, written by Machado de Assis in 1881. The novel, narrated by a deceased, is known for its ironic tone and pessimism. Brás Cubas, the protagonist, narrates his memories and reflections after death, exploring themes such as the futility of life, the hypocrisy of society and the inevitability of death. This ebook aims to counter the ideas presented by Machado de Assis, offering a more optimistic and humanistic vision of life and human relationships. The choice of a deceased narrator is, in itself, a literary innovation that allows Machado de Assis to explore the human condition from a unique perspective. Freed from social conventions and worldly concerns, Brás Cubas recounts his life with ironic detachment, exposing the weaknesses and contradictions of the living. His critical look at 19th century society is acidic and revealing, denouncing the moral failures and hypocrisies of the individuals who make up the social fabric. In this context, the futility of life emerges as a central theme. Brás Cubas, when revisiting his experiences, often concludes that his efforts and ambitions were in vain. The incessant search for pleasure, power and recognition is portrayed as useless and ephemeral. This pessimistic view reflects the narrator's disbelief in the human capacity to find lasting meaning or true happiness amid the vicissitudes of existence. Furthermore, society's hypocrisy is forcefully exposed. Brás Cubas describes an elite concerned with appearances, where publicly proclaimed virtues are often contradicted by selfish and self-serving actions. Morality is often a facade, and people's true motivation is revealed to be self-benefit. This social criticism is a trademark of Machado de Assis's work, which, with his wit, challenges readers to question values and behaviors accepted without reflection. The inevitability of death, finally, is a theme that permeates the entire novel. The death of Brás Cubas is the starting point for the narrative, and his condition as deceased-narrator underlines the certainty that all human efforts end in the same inevitable conclusion. Death levels all social distinctions and makes all worldly achievements irrelevant. This recognition of the transience of life gives the novel a melancholic and philosophical tone, leading the reader to reflect on their own mortality. However, this ebook proposes a different reading. Although "Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" presents a discouraging view of life and human nature, we believe that it is possible to find a more optimistic and humanistic perspective on human experiences and relationships. Life, with all its imperfections and challenges, is also filled with moments of beauty, kindness and meaning. Human relationships, even marked by failures, can be sources of support, love and mutual growth. Through this work, we seek to explore how resilience, empathy and the search for a purpose can counter Brás Cubas' pessimism. We believe that, despite adversity, life offers opportunities for personal development and the construction of a more just and compassionate society. We invite the reader to reflect on these possibilities and discover a more positive and hopeful approach to the human condition. Welcome to this journey of rediscovery and reinterpretation of the "Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas". May this reading inspire new thoughts and feelings, promoting a more balanced and optimistic view of life and human relationships.
New York Times Critics’ Best of the Year A landmark event, the complete stories of Machado de Assis finally appear in English for the first time in this extraordinary new translation. Widely acclaimed as the progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Machado de Assis (1839–1908)—the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves—was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil’s greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963 and still lacks proper recognition today. Drawn to the master’s psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siècle Rio de Janeiro, a world populated with dissolute plutocrats, grasping parvenus, and struggling spinsters, acclaimed translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have now combined Machado’s seven short-story collections into one volume, featuring seventy-six stories, a dozen appearing in English for the first time. Born in the outskirts of Rio, Machado displayed a precocious interest in books and languages and, despite his impoverished background, miraculously became a well-known intellectual figure in Brazil’s capital by his early twenties. His daring narrative techniques and coolly ironic voice resemble those of Thomas Hardy and Henry James, but more than either of these writers, Machado engages in an open playfulness with his reader—as when his narrator toys with readers’ expectations of what makes a female heroine in “Miss Dollar,” or questions the sincerity of a slave’s concern for his dying master in “The Tale of the Cabriolet.” Predominantly set in the late nineteenth-century aspiring world of Rio de Janeiro—a city in the midst of an intense transformation from colonial backwater to imperial metropolis—the postcolonial realism of Machado’s stories anticipates a dominant theme of twentieth-century literature. Readers witness the bourgeoisie of Rio both at play, and, occasionally, attempting to be serious, as depicted by the chief character of “The Alienist,” who makes naively grandiose claims for his Brazilian hometown at the expense of the cultural capitals of Europe. Signifiers of new wealth and social status abound through the landmarks that populate Machado’s stories, enlivening a world in the throes of transformation: from the elegant gardens of Passeio Público and the vibrant Rua do Ouvidor—the long, narrow street of fashionable shops, theaters and cafés, “the Via Dolorosa of long-suffering husbands”—to the port areas of Saúde and Gamboa, and the former Valongo slave market. One of the greatest masters of the twentieth century, Machado reveals himself to be an obsessive collector of other people’s lives, who writes: “There are no mysteries for an author who can scrutinize every nook and cranny of the human heart.” Now, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis brings together, for the first time in English, all of the stories contained in the seven collections published in his lifetime, from 1870 to 1906. A landmark literary event, this majestic translation reintroduces a literary giant who must finally be integrated into the world literary canon.
"One of the wittiest, most playful, and . . . most alive and ageless books ever written." --Dave Eggers, The New Yorker A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas A Penguin Classic 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. This new English translation is the first to include extensive notes providing crucial historical and cultural context. Unlike other editions, it also preserves Machado's original chapter breaks--each of the novel's 160 short chapters begins on a new page--and includes excerpts from previous versions of the novel never before published in English. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
“Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881?”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Now considered a progenitor of South American fiction, Machado de Assis’s highly experimental novel is finally rendered as a stunningly contemporary work. Narrating from beyond the grave, Brás Cubas—an enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable antihero—describes his childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs, and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. “Rejuvenated” (Pradeep Niroula, Chicago Review of Books) by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s fresh new translation, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a work of acerbic mockery and deep pathos that offers a bird’s-eye view of how Machado de Assis launched the canon of modernist fiction.“Sprinkled with epigrams, dreams, gags and asides, the story teases, dances and delights.”—Economist
I the Supreme imagines a dialogue between the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator known as Dr. Francia and Policarpo Patiño, his secretary and only companion. The opening pages present a sign that they had found nailed to the wall of a cathedral, purportedly written by Dr. Francia himself and ordering the execution of all of his servants upon his death. This sign is quickly revealed to be a forgery, which takes leader and secretary into a larger discussion about the nature of truth: “In the light of what Your Eminence says, even the truth appears to be a lie.” Their conversation broadens into an epic journey of the mind, stretching across the colonial history of their nation, filled with surrealist imagery, labyrinthine turns, and footnotes supplied by a mysterious “compiler.” A towering achievement from a foundational author of modern Latin American literature, I the Supreme is a darkly comic, deeply moving meditation on power and its abuse—and on the role of language in making and unmaking whole worlds.
Examines how racial identity and race relations are expressed in the writings of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), Brazil's foremost author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Despite the apparent ubiquity of light literature, and despite the greater cultural prestige it has been afforded in recent decades, very little has been written on the adjective that actually defines this category. What, precisely, does it signify, and what are some of the key strategies by which the effect of lightness is achieved within literary discourse? In this original and engaging study, Bede Scott explores the aesthetic quality of lightness as demonstrated by a diverse range of narratives – spanning four different centuries and five different countries. In each case, he focuses on a specific 'type' of lightness, whether it be the refined triviality of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, the ludic tendencies of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, or the 'exhilarating and primitive vitality' of Voltaire's Candide. By bringing together such disparate sources, Scott makes a strong case for the universality of this particular aesthetic value, while also subjecting its underlying structural features to close critical scrutiny.
Like Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Richard Zenith’s Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer—but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius. Much as Nobel laureate José Saramago brought a single heteronym to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa’s imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms’ writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal. Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of Pessoa’s adolescence—when the first heteronyms emerged—and his bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith introduces us, too, to Pessoa’s bohemian circle of friends, and to Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet’s unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa’s posthumous literary achievements—especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet. A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.
An in-depth look at how Machado de Assis affirms his uniqueness through the role of a reflective reader who eventually becomes a self-reflective author, whose text is primarily the written memory of his private library
In "The Devil's Church", by Machado de Assis, the Devil, tired of his usual role as tempter, decides to create his own church to lead mankind astray. He promises men power and pleasure, but without the fear of eternal hell, offering a religion of debauchery and hedonism. The satire deals with the corruption and hypocrisy of religious institutions, revealing human nature and its contradictions.