A new translation, by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, is a glorious gift to the world, because it sparkles, because it sings, because it’s very funny and manages to capture Machado’s inimitable tone, at once mordant and wistful, self-lacerating and romantic. It is a glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read, but, for no good reason at all, almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it (and I first read it only recently, in 2019).īut it survives, and must be read, for the music of its prose and, more than anything else, for its formal playfulness. It is a love story-many love stories, really-and it’s a comedy of class and manners and ego, and it’s a reflection on a nation and a time, and an unflinching look at mortality, and all the while it’s an intimate and ecstatic exploration of storytelling itself. Long forgotten by most, it’s one of the wittiest, most playful, and therefore most alive and ageless books ever written. “ The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, is a case in point. It does not collect dust, and, when done right, it does not age. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s masterwork celebrates the jokes of life.
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