The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Library of Latin America) - Softcover

Machado De Assis, Joaquim Maria; Rabassa, Gregory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195101707 ISBN 13: 9780195101706

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998

Synopsis

"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brs Cubas. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.

By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brs Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it. Newly translated by Gregory Rabassa and superbly edited by Enylton de S Rego and Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, this Library of Latin America edition brings to English-speaking readers a literary delight of the highest order.

About this title

Review

Fans of Latin American literature will be thrilled by Oxford University Press's new translations of works by 19th-century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. His novels are both heartbreaking and comic; his limning of a colonial Brazil in flux is both perceptive and remarkably modern. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written as an autobiography, a chronicle of the erotic misadventures of its narrator, Brás Cubas--who happens to be dead. In pursuit of love and progeny, Cubas rejects the women who want him and aspires to the ones who reject him. In the end, he dies unloved and without heirs, yet he somehow manages to turn this bitter pill into a victory of sorts. What makes Memoirs stand up 100 years after the book was written is Machado's biting humor, brilliant prose, and profound understanding of all the vagaries of human behavior.

About the Author

Gregory Rabassa is the highly acclaimed translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude and many other works of Latin American fiction. Enylton de S Rego is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. Gilberto Pinheiro Passos is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of So Paulo.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0195101707
• ISBN 13: 9780195101706
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240