Book: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Autor: Machado de Assis
Country: Brazil 🇧🇷
Format: E-book
Pages: 176
Publication: 1881

This book was read mostly between 3 and 6 am. Back in October, I was having a lot of problems with insomnia, and having this book on my phone helped me to go back to sleep many nights. Not that the book is boring, this has been happening with every e-book I read during the night, in dark mode. Perfect.

This book is considered one of the classics of Brazilian literature, Ann Morgan herself has this on her list. I read it for school as a teenager but decided to revisit it.

This Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is the fictitious memoir of a well-to-do man living in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1800s. The difference is that here he’s writing the memoir after his death – he even dedicates the book to the first worm that started eating his flesh.

Two main characteristics of Brás Cubas soon become clear: 1. He definitely loves himself (I mean, who would go to the trouble of writing your own memoir from the grave?) and 2. He’s definitely not a good writer. The chapters are erratic, some short, some long, several go off on a tangent about random things and he even threatens to cut some of the text off.

This is an interesting case of a narrator who’s a separate entity from the true author – in this case, Machado de Assis. It must be an interesting effort to write a book as someone who’s not very good at it, and I wonder how much of Machado de Assis’ personality coincided with Brás Cubas.

Machado de Assis was the first mixed-race author to make a name for himself. Interestingly enough, many portraits of him would show him with a lighter skin tone, something that started to be fixed only recently.

He was the grandson of freed slaves and because of his poor upbringing he never had the chance to attend university, so he taught himself many of the necessary skills to move up in society. Today he’s still considered one of the greatest writers of Brazilian literature and was the founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which is to this day the most important literary institution in the country. And he’s depicted in stamps!

So how much of Machado de Assis there is in Brás Cubas? I’m not sure, but I hope not much. It soon becomes clear that Brás is a despicable man, full of himself, surrounded by the luxuries of his rich family.

Machado wrote this book when his health was not good and when he had a pessimistic view of life. At the time of the writing of the book slavery still existed in Brazil (it was abolished in 1889, one of the last countries in the Americas), and is chilling to read the character casually referring to enslaved men as his property. Machado was against slavery, but avoided talking about it in public and was widely criticized for that.

And yet, you find yourself rooting for Brás and his many lost loves and wanting for his endeavours to succeed. I think this is the charm of a good author, one that can create not only a character that goes through all sorts of tribulations but also a character capable of having his own personality and even writing his own book.

But to me, the erratic chapters and behaviours of Mr. Cubas had the effect of tiring me up (or was it the lack of sleep?) and I found myself dragging through the last third of the book. Nevertheless, I want to read at least one other book by Machado, Dom Casmurro, a dark comedy about a tormented jealous husband. Then I’ll be able to understand better what was Machado and what was Brás.

In the end, this is a really good read, and I recommend this book to anyone who wants to dive into the classics of Brazilian or even South American literature.

Read more about Brazilian authors:
– Doramar: Stories of Those Who Were Forgotten
– Book Review: Child of the Dark*- The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus
– Book Review: From Scraps to the Everest