Beschreibung:
"e;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."e; So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Bras 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 "e;good riddance"e; to the critic looking for a "e;run-of-the-mill-novel"e;. Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Bras 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, Bras Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.
“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