The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Read Online Free

readers—the last, that is, before the best surprise, the book itself.
    Machado de Assis was born in 1839, in Rio de Janeiro. His father, a poor house painter, was the son of freed slaves. His mother was a servant from, the Azores who worked in a wealthy household on the outskirts of the city. She died when her son was nine years old. Machado’s father was remarried to a poor black woman, and then died a few years later. Machado de Assis, therefore, grew up a poor, mulatto orphan, the grandson of slaves in a country where slavery would continue officiallyto exist until he was fifty years old. He had no formal education and probably never attended school.
    Machado also had some other problems: he was frail and shy, terribly myopic. He almost went blind at forty, and he stuttered and was epileptic. Despite all these social and personal disadvantages, he acquired French and English, read voraciously in several languages, worked as a typesetter and journalist and from his youth onward dedicated his life to literature. At thirty-one, he married a Portuguese woman five years his senior. She died in 1904 and he, four years later. As founder and president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, he was recognized as the most important and famous writer of his time. He wrote nine novels, a few plays and volumes of poetry, some literary criticism, many journalistic columns, and also published a few excellent translations from French and English.
    Some literary critics, both in Brazil and abroad, have tried to explain Machado’s production in terms of his biological and psychological history. Some have suggested that he wrote in a fragmented style because he stuttered. Others have focused on the influence of his epilepsy and his eye problems on his approach to life and literature. Others still have suggested that his racial origins determined the content of his literary production.
    This search for an ultimate scientific cause for Machado’s literary genius is ironic, given his radically skeptical views of all-encompassing explanations of human behavior, especially those of the reductionist kind. Whatever the reason for his greatness, it is surprising that a man who was born in poverty, had no formal education, and faced so many physical and social disadvantages was able to become such an impressive writer. His novels—and most of all these
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
—have been admired, studied, analyzed, and even carefully dissected by many critics, some very sympathetic and some less so. But even those who are not amused by his style and his message do not deny his importance for Brazilian and world literature.
    But I fear this introduction is becoming too long. As Brás Cubas himself says in his first words to the reader, “the best prologue is the one that says the fewest things or which tells them in an obscure and truncated way … The work itself is everything.”
    So you have been warned, dear potential reader of this book: enjoy it, but beware, because there is in it some deadly humor at work.
    —
Enylton de Sá Rego

THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS

To the Worm
Who
Gnawed the Cold Flesh
of My Corpse
I Dedicate
These Posthumous Memoirs
As a Nostalgic Remembrance
     

Prologue to the Third Edition
     
    The first edition of these
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
came in sections in the
Revista Brásileira
during the 1880s. When they were put into book form later on I corrected the text in several places. Now that I have had to review it for the third edition, I have emended yet a few more things and eliminated two or three dozen lines. Revised in this way, this work which seems to have garnered some acceptance on the part of the public, is published once again.
    Capistrano de Abreu, taking note of the publication of the book, asked “Is
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
a novel?” Macedo Soares in a letter that he wrote me around that time recalled fondly the
Travels in My Land
[of Almeida Garrett]. To the