Posthumous Memoirs of Brs Cubas: A Novel [Hardcover]

I passed away at two oclock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city. So begins Machado de Assiss The most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel I read this year was originally published in 1881. Jull Costa and Patterson offer a peerless translation of this comic masterpiece, narrated from beyond the grave by a feckless, pretentious, impossibly winning aristocrat. The Brazilian novelist Machado was besotted with the license afforded by fiction and the social critique permitted only by comedy. Read this witty, wildly inventive work and how conservative, how painfully corseted so much modern fiction will suddenly seem. One of [De Assis'] most celebrated works, Beneath all this outward respectability, his prose was radically ingenious. Ever since A great ironist, a tragic comedian. . . . In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh. The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America. The supreme black literary artist to date.