布拉斯·库巴斯死后的回忆

On a Friday afternoon in August 1869, a gentleman of Rio de Janeiro's upper crust died of pneumonia. The coffin was still warm when the narrator started talking — he dedicates his memoirs to the first worm that gnawed his corpse. This self-declared "deceased author" (defunto autor) calls himself Brás Cubas, and he means to write a book from beyond the grave, live his life over on the page, and laugh at it. The subtitle, Epitaph of a Small Winner, gives the game away: this is no solemn deathbed confession. It is a man with nothing left to lose, settling accounts with the living from inside his own grave. The first time I heard how this book opens, I sat still for a few seconds — I had not known a novel could begin that way.

The author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, was born in the late 1830s and died in the early twentieth century, and he is Brazil's national writer. This novel, whose original title is Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, ran as a serial in Brazilian magazines from 1880 into the following year before being collected into a book, and it is now recognized as the true founding work of Brazilian realism, arriving nearly a century before the Latin American classics most readers know better. The book earned its place in the history of the novel because it did something almost none of its contemporaries dared: it took the machinery of novel-writing apart in front of you. The standard English translation is by Gregory Rabassa, published by Oxford University Press. Susan Sontag and Woody Allen have praised it publicly, and postmodernists like John Barth and Donald Barthelme have both named it as a source.

The narrator, Brás Cubas himself, was born in 1805 into an upper-class Rio family, ran wild as a young man, and drifted through parliament and drawing rooms in middle age — a man who spent a lifetime in Rio society and left nothing behind worth bragging about. Death turns him into a voice with nothing left to lose: since he is already dead, lying, boasting, confessing, and sneering all cost him nothing now. Around him stand a handful of people flattened by the stage set of imperial Rio. His childhood friend Quincas Borba goes on to found an absurd philosophy called Humanitism, which treats everything in the world as capital belonging to the human spirit, profit and loss included. Virgília, daughter of Councillor Dutra, is the great love of Cubas's life, yet she marries the politician Lobo Neves instead, for the sake of standing. Dona Plácida is the woman hired to keep watch over the couple's secret rented rooms, and uses the arrangement to squeeze a little money out of Cubas herself. This whole web of relationships is imperial high society in miniature: lineage, titles, parliamentary speeches, political marriages, secret rented rooms — all of it scenery for the same play. Looking back from the grave, what Cubas sees is the backdrop of that stage.

Cubas announces his own death first, then doubles back to childhood. The structure itself runs backward — he does not live his life out for you in order, he jumps to whatever rhythm a dead man feels like talking in. The story's first stop is a rich boy in Rio in 1805. Precocious and spoiled, the boy rides the family's enslaved child, Prudêncio, like a horse and whips him for fun. It is the ugliest passage in the book, and the author has no intention of making it easy on you — he lets the narrator tell it himself, with no excuse and no polish, like picking a scab off a wound.

It is in these boyhood days that Cubas ties himself, for life, to the man who will haunt him: Quincas Borba. Borba later sinks into begging in the streets but never lets go of his pseudo-philosophy of accounting for everything as human capital, and Cubas takes him in and keeps him until he dies. One man dies of poverty and disease preaching an absurd philosophy; the man who listened to him dies of pneumonia. Neither account ever gets settled. As a young man, Cubas falls for Marcela, one of Rio's high-priced courtesans, squanders the family fortune on her, and gets shipped off by his father to study law in Coimbra, Portugal. The book disposes of the whole episode in a few short chapters and a handful of lines — Cubas himself does not think it worth dwelling on. That is his particular skill: he will not give even his own old wounds a second look.

He returns home with his degree, buries his father, then his mother. Cubas falls in love with Virgília, Councillor Dutra's daughter, but she marries the politician Lobo Neves instead, for the sake of position. Cubas himself goes into politics as a deputy, and for decades he and Virgília keep up a secret affair in rented rooms across town, with Dona Plácida standing guard. In the drawing room they recognize each other by a look, a signal. The affair is written with real restraint — the author rarely lets you see the two of them in bed, only a glance passed between two actors across a parlor. One line of dialogue, one gesture, one chance shared carriage ride is enough to carry a chapter spanning thirty years.

In middle age Cubas moves through parliament, works the drawing rooms, turns up at peace conferences in Paris, and finds the whole business empty. His sister Sabina tries to marry him off to a niece to shore up the family's reputation; he goes through the motions and it comes to nothing — the author dispatches this whole courtship in a couple of lines, deliberately letting the reader see how the respectable machinery of an upper-class family handles a scandal. His final obsession settles on an absurd invention, the Brás Cubas Plaster, a cure-all he claims will heal the world's melancholy. The plaster is a metaphor for his whole life: he wants to leave something behind, invent something, prove he did not live for nothing. It cures no one. It kills him first.

Quincas Borba's Humanitism is the strangest piece in the whole puzzle. A parody of Stoicism crossed with Schopenhauer, it treats everything in existence as capital belonging to the human spirit: losses are yours to absorb, gains are yours to keep, and birth, sickness, death, love, and hatred are all just entries on the ledger. Cubas uses this hollow shell to settle his own accounts: his reckless spending, it turns out, was just "an investment of human spiritual capital"; his mediocrity and childlessness meant he never passed life's misery on to a new generation. What the philosophy is actually good for is letting a man call his shame an investment and his failure a victory. The more solemnly Borba preaches it, the colder Cubas laughs. The idea later became a source for a generation of American postmodernists, John Barth and Donald Barthelme among them, who have said as much themselves.

Structure is where this book really cuts. It runs to a hundred and sixty short, restless chapters, and free association, digressions, philosophical jottings, and direct appeals to the reader all take their turn. The narrator breaks off constantly: "Dear reader, allow me a digression," "I am skipping this chapter," "let me leap ahead fifteen years and talk about a fly instead." Worse still, the author drops the reflections of Machado the novelist straight into the middle of his character's life. The novelist himself climbs into his own novel to tell you why he wrote it this way. It is a flat violation of everything nineteenth-century realism asked of tight causality and linear plot. This formal revolt echoes the opening line, the dead man taking up his pen. Since the author is already dead, he owes the living no obligation to tell time the way they do; since the novel has already thrown its doors open, the novelist is free to walk in and talk to you. While other writers of the 1880s were still dutifully laying out beginning, middle, climax, and end, Machado de Assis had already taken the novel apart and laid the pieces out on the table for you to look at.

By the end, Cubas gathers every chapter into a single backward glance from the grave. Death is not a full stop; it is his reason to start talking again. He tallies his own account: no children, no achievement worth handing down, nothing to boast of, and therefore no misery of life passed on to the next generation. By that arithmetic, he comes out a winner after all. That is exactly where the irony of the subtitle lands: Epitaph of a Small Winner. A man who calls his own failure a victory is absurd. A book that calls that absurdity a philosophy is this one. A writer who leaves you laughing along, coldly, once you have finished it, is Machado de Assis. The drawing rooms of imperial Rio, the parliament, the secret rented rooms, the sham philosophy, the miracle plaster: a dead man gathers all of it into one sentence at the end. I left nothing behind, and that is why I win. The colder that sentence sounds, the less you can sit still.

A companion guide gives you the map. The text itself is the land. Knowing the plot in advance is not a reason to skip the book, because a few things here cannot survive being retold. The first is the rhythm of those short chapters: a hundred and sixty restless fragments like a life deliberately cut up and pieced back together, and any summary reads that rhythm flat where the original reads it jolting. The second is the narrator's voice: a man dead for more than eighty years, chatting with you from inside his grave, and only the original can hold his pacing, his pauses, the timing of his sarcasm. The third is the discomfort in the details: the passage where the child rides an enslaved boy like a horse is handled lighter than you would expect, and heavier for it, and you can only feel the weight of that lightness in the original prose. One more thing. The book was written in 1881, staged in a Rio that still had an emperor, still had slavery, still had councillors and old family names. A Rio gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century laughed at all of it from beyond his own grave, and that laugh still sits you up straight a hundred and forty years later. That is why the book is still being read.