The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

The book’s law is caprice, and caprice is hard to test by subtraction: a digression on a fly, a chapter on the reader’s defects, a chapter of dots each seem removable one at a time, and taken singly perhaps a tenth of the chapters could go without losing a fact or a turn. But the volubility is what the book exposes, so the removable chapters are also its evidence. What is strictly required is large: the death and the plaster that caused it, the delirium, the three loves, the political failure, Quincas Borba’s system, and the last chapter’s ledger, which needs everything before it. Held below the top because the joke on form sometimes runs as joke only, and a hostile reader can name chapters the book would not miss.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a ruling class that lives on others’ labour lives without consequence, and its freedom from consequence shows as an inability to finish anything, a love, a career, an invention, a sentence. Brás is rich, idle, mildly cruel and charming, and the book makes the reader complicit in his charm. The sharpest single disclosure is Prudêncio, the boy Brás rode as a horse, freed, and found in the Valongo beating a slave of his own, a scene Brás reads with a philosopher’s amusement: domination teaches itself downward, and the man who sees it draws no conclusion. Love is entered as a sum, Marcela’s in months and contos. Held off the top because the disclosure belongs to one class and one society, and the women are seen as he sees them.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The book refuses elevation as a principle, written, it says, with the pen of mockery and the ink of melancholy, and that refusal is what holds this axis lowest of the twelve: frequency is low by design, and the axis counts it. It rises once to real height, in the delirium of chapter VII, where Brás is carried back on a hippopotamus to the origin of the centuries, meets a vast woman who is Nature, and watches the ages pass in procession, each a mirage of happiness over the same misery; that chapter stands with the great cosmic visions of its century in a few pages. Elsewhere the lift is the cold kind: Eugênia refused for her lameness, Nhã-loló dead of yellow fever and absorbed in a paragraph, the final negatives.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Two structures are built rather than evoked. The dead narrator is one, a dead man who has become an author, for whom the grave was a second cradle: speech from beyond the grave, freed of shame, is an old figure, and here it carries the whole book. The delirium is the other: Nature as Pandora, the procession of the ages, the man returned to the origin and shown that it is indifferent to him. Beside them, the plaster against hypochondria is a small Faustian ambition gone comic, and Humanitism a parody system for a century of systems. But the particular, a Rio heir of the 1840s, stays more type than archetype, a figure of a class more than of humankind; the deep is reached in a frame and a chapter, not through the body of the action. The Epochal Gate fails here.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The departure is from Machado’s own first manner, the four earlier novels ending with Iaiá Garcia (1878), and from the Brazilian novel as it stood, romantic in Alencar and turning naturalist after Eça’s O Primo Basílio (1878), which Machado had attacked in print. Against both he chose the free form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre: a dead first person, short chapters, an insulted reader and a typography that jokes. The stake was real: a successful novelist of forty-one abandoning the form that had made him, in a market of serial readers. Held off the top because the turn is announced as an inheritance, the lineage named on the first page, and Sterne had done the formal work. The swerve is in putting that form to work on a slave society.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told in a sober third person, Brás Cubas is a dull life: a rich man’s affairs, a seat in the Chamber, no children. Told by himself, dead, with the right to digress, mock, skip, leave a chapter blank and blame the reader, the caprice becomes the matter: the narrator does to the reader what his class does to everyone, and the reader enjoys it. The chapter of dots on not becoming a minister is the career, rendered exactly. The dead man’s freedom from consequence is the living man’s freedom from consequence, made formal: the form is an instrument of knowledge. Held a little below the very highest because some typographical play is ornament rather than knowledge.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The book has been re-read for more than a century without exhausting, and the re-readings changed what it is. Read first as a pessimist’s comedy of manners, then as a Sternean metafiction ahead of modernism, it was read again by Roberto Schwarz, in Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo (1990), as the social form of the Brazilian elite made into narrative method, a reading itself argued with for thirty years. Each return finds more in the surfaces: the ledger of loves, the muleteer whose reward shrinks as the debt cools, Virgília’s husband in the house, Dona Plácida’s whole life as a sentence of service, the dogs over a bone that Quincas Borba admires as Humanitas. The last chapter still divides readers over whether its small surplus is irony, despair or the truth.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is the literature of the Portuguese language and the novel of the nineteenth century. Intrinsic force is high, about 9.0: a real reorganisation of what the realist novel could do, made in 1880, before the modernists it seems to anticipate, by subordinating plot to a narrating consciousness that is the book’s subject and its suspect. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Brazil decisive, the book dividing Machado’s career and Brazilian fiction in two, the national novel after it unthinkable without it, and in Portuguese generally at the head of its century beside Eça; outside the language real but delayed and largely indirect, from Grossman’s translation of 1952 to two new English translations in 2020. Reach about 8.2. It did not redirect the European novel.

Score: 8.6 / 10

A text of 1881, weighed in the band for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole and uncontested, from a serial and a book Machado oversaw, with later editions in his lifetime and no textual problem of consequence; nothing is charged on form. Presence in its language is continuous and total: read in Brazilian schools and set for university entrance for generations, edited without break, quoted in common speech. Presence beyond the language is thinner and later, built largely in the last seventy years and much of it in the academy, with the sell-out of the Penguin translation of 2020 as evidence of a widening readership. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment in a way that harms it: the Empire and slavery are its matter, not its date stamp.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Machado’s Portuguese. Command of the prose is complete. The sentence is short, exact, ironic without strain; the chapter is a unit of timing, opened and closed like a joke or a blow; the narrator’s voice holds for one hundred and sixty chapters without a lapse of register. The opening joke, a dead author who is not an author who has died, turns on word order alone. The dedication to the worm is a perfect sentence, and the closing chapter is a ledger in prose that lands its last clause, on the children he never had, as a credit. The making is load-bearing. Held below the top only for a few typographic and digressive chapters that are cleverer than they are necessary.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the delirium, a cosmic vision on the scale of all ages, and the account of Marcela kept in contos and months. Both obey one law, that of a dead man who looks at everything, the universe and his own appetites, with the same unillusioned amusement, and finds in each the same indifference and the same vanity. The comic chapters and the deaths, his mother’s and Nhã-loló’s, are held in one tone, and the reader feels no seam when grief is entered in the voice of a joke on punctuation. Humanitism, which could have been a separate satire, is folded into the law: the philosophy of a world in which the stronger dog wins the bone and calls it necessity. Charged because the delirium’s register, once, is visibly higher than the book’s.

Score: 9.0 / 10

One consciousness holds a good deal: the family, father, mother, the sister Sabina and Cotrim, the slaver brother in law; the economy of a slave society, Prudêncio, the Valongo, inherited money; the state, a deputy’s seat and a ministry not attained; love bought and kept and refused; philosophy, in Humanitism; death and the natural order, in the delirium, the cemetery and the worm. They are integrated, not listed, because each passes through the same judging voice. But the book is short and its world is one class in one city: labour is seen from the veranda, the sacred appears only as absence, and history enters as the furniture of a life rather than its force. Nothing exceeds Brás, which is the point and also the ceiling.

Score: 8.4 / 10