The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (Oxford University Press hardcover, 1997)
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa)
Brazil, 1881

"For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch." --The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 7

Like Machado de Assis' equally entertaining Dom Casmurro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a fake autobiography--written with "a playful pen and melancholy ink" (5)--concerned with events that take place in the late 19th century Brazil of its one-time upper crust protagonist. It's also a tragicomic send-up of the man of letters revealing the mysteries of life through literature, the twist here being that its voluble narrator, dead of pneumonia at the age of 64, inexplicably chose to launch his writing career from the other side of eternity. Chapter 1, "The Author's Demise," covers many of the essential autobiographical details, but elsewhere in his book of life Brás Cubas recounts his ill-starred love affairs and failed political ambitions with great panache, an unbridled wit, and a generous dollop of pessimism. He has a poetic way with words ("I was holding the binoculars of the imagination," he quips in a typical moment [100]), but he also knows when to take a breather when necessary (chapter 139, "How I Didn't Get to Be Minister of States," has no words at all, only telling ellipses). In short, he's almost everything you could want in a narrator except that he knows things about the modern reader that you might not want to hear. A great jab in the eye of conventional fiction/memoir writing marred only by some of the worst proofreading (typos every few pages) I've ever seen in a university press book. (http://www.oup.com/)

"I'm beginning to regret this book. Not that it bores me, I have nothing to do and, really, putting together a few meager chapters for that other world is always a task that distracts me from eternity a little. But the book is tedious, it has the smell of the grave about it; it has a certain cadaveric contraction about it, a serious fault, insignificant to boot because the main defect of this book is you, reader. You're in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration, a regular and fluid style, and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble and fall...

And they do fall! Miserable leaves of my cypress of death, you shall fall like any others, beautiful and brilliant as you are. And, if I had eyes, I would shed a nostalgic tear for you. This is the great advantage of death, which if it leaves no mouth with which to laugh, neither does it leave eyes with which to weep... You shall fall." --The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 111

Machado de Assis: For more on "Brazil's most important novelist," a grandson of freed slaves, see Marc Bain's "Speak, Memory" in Newsweek here.

Next port of call on the Orbis Terrarum Challenge 2009: Canada (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin), Cuba (José Lezama Lima, Paradiso), or ??? (???).

Dom Casmurro

Dom Casmurro (1997 hardback)
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Brazil, 1899
ISBN 0-19-51038-4

"I turned to face her; Capitu had her eyes on the ground. She soon lifted them, slowly, and we stood there looking at one another... Childhood confession, I could give two or three pages over to you, but I must be economical. The truth is, we said nothing; the wall said it all for us. We did not move, but our hands stretched out little by little, all four of them, taking hold of each other, clasping each other, melting into one another. I didn't take down the exact time of the gesture. I should have done so; I regret not having a note written that same night, which I could reproduce here with all its spelling mistakes: though it would have none, such was the difference between the scholar and the adolescent. I knew all the rules of orthography, but had no suspicion of the rules of love; I had gone through orgies of Latin and was a virgin with women.

We did not unclasp our hands, nor did they drop of their own accord, out of weariness or inattention. Our eyes stared into one another, then looked away, strayed for a while, then came back to each other again... A future priest, I faced her as before an altar: one of her cheeks was the Epistle and the other the Gospel. Her mouth might have been the chalice, her lips the paten. All I needed was to say a new mass, according to a Latin that no one learns at school, and is the catholic language of mankind. Don't think me sacrilegious, devout lady reader; the purity of the intention cleanses anything unorthodox in the style. We stood there with heaven within us. Our hands, their nerve ends touching, made two creatures one: a single, seraphic being. Our eyes went on saying infinite things, and the words did not even try to pass our lips: they went back to the heart as silently as they had come..." (Machado de Assis, 28-29)

While Brazilian culture's never had the death-grip on my imagination that fiction and films from France, Italy, and the Spanish-speaking world have lorded over me for years, Dom Casmurro went a long ways toward changing that during the brief amount of time I was lost in its pages. A worthy rival to Lampedusa's The Leopard for the best fictional non-fiction I've come across this year, this slyly chatty novel poses as the giddy first-person account of Rio de Janeiro native Bento Santiago's 1857 schoolboy romance with his beautiful neighbor Capitu Pádua, told some forty years after the fact when one lover's jealousy and a series of unkind surprises from life for both have taken their inevitable toll on the couple's first moments of teenage happiness.

Bento's no 19th-century pícaro to be sure, but he's just as disarming and witty a narrator as our old friend Lazarillo de Tormes. Always fussing over the sequence of events in his manuscript and worrying about how the reader will react to his telling of the story of the first love of his heart, he cuts a very charming, convincing and credible figure as a memoirist even as doubts begin to surface about the reliability of his judgement and memory. In addition, he's surrounded by a well-drawn cast of characters prone to making grand statements about life being like an opera ("God is the poet, the music is by Satan, [and the] special theater, this planet" [18-19])--not bad for a consciously "literary" romance set in a land wracked by fever epidemics, floods, leprosy and slavery, no? A great read.

• Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria. Dom Casmurro (translated by John Gledson). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Machado de Assis