Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881?
This month sees the arrival of two new translations of “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” the Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ masterpiece, a metafictional, metaphysical tale narrated by a man struck dead by pneumonia. Too grim? I neglected to mention that he’s being carried into the afterlife on the back of a voluble and enormous hippopotamus.
If we imagine the historical progress of the novel like the evolution of man — from a crouching primate to upright homo sapiens — Machado’s book represents the moment when the novel learned to dance. The book draws from the omnivorous taste of its creator: Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Schopenhauer, leavened by the picaresque tradition of Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. Its formal experimentation and playfulness are regarded as precursors to the novels of Nabokov, Calvino and the American postmodernists.
The story follows the feckless, peerlessly lazy nobleman Brás Cubas as he reflects on his life from beyond the grave. What a record of failures! He never married, never fathered children. His career ambitions were foolhardy and thwarted. Even his mistresses inspired in him only lukewarm passion and vague pity. He is unremittingly pretentious, preening — and superb company. We read not for plot, in the usual sense, but to be close to Brás Cubas, his disarming candor and deeply merited self-disgust, and for the questions he prompts: What is a life, if defined outside of incident and achievement? What is a novel?
“To love this book,” Susan Sontag once wrote, “is to become a little less provincial about literature, about literature’s possibilities.”
Machado was born into poverty in 1839, the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves. A ferocious autodidact, he began publishing poetry in his teens. He branched into writing theater criticism, newspaper columns, librettos and short stories. When he died in 1908, heralded as Brazil’s greatest writer, he was nationally mourned.
For all of his heavyweight champions in the English-speaking world (including Sontag, Philip Roth, John Updike), his standing has been wobbly. It’s said that each generation rediscovers Machado anew. These two new translations bring another opportunity to enshrine the singular talent and mischief of this writer, whose late novels are insurrections against the novel itself, against its tendencies toward banal realism and earnest piety.
Machado’s attacks tend to be sidelong. His favorite weapons are irony and charm — although he doesn’t shy from needling readers, especially critics, for their narrowness of taste and fondness for facile interpretation. (Duly noted.) He is a writer besotted with the license afforded by fiction. Why not narrate a chapter solely in dialogue stripped of everything but punctuation — provided you can do it well? Why not render one section in ellipses or skip the climax altogether? Read Machado, and much contemporary fiction can suddenly appear painfully corseted and conservative.
The two new translations have their differences, but are remarkably complementary. Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s edition is a gift to scholars. Her introductory essay and notes offer a rich guide to Machado’s work and world — and an important corrective. Machado has been described as reticent on race. In fact, Thomson-DeVeaux reveals, his fiction is drenched in references to the slave trade. Modern readers, especially non-Brazilians, just haven’t known where to look. In this novel, these references are seeded into the geography. Take a scene in which Brás Cubas mentions passing through the Valongo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Thomson-DeVeaux writes that Machado’s contemporaries would recognize the name instantly as the site of the city’s old slave market — once the largest in the Americas. This is the backdrop to our aristocrat’s leisurely philosophical inquiry and self-preoccupation; this is the subtlety of Machado’s psychological shading.
Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, who translated the monumental 2018 edition of Machado’s “Collected Stories,” offer little historical context, only sparse notes. Their book is unadorned, and often better for it, where the common reader is concerned. We encounter the novel not as a relic, encrusted with renown and analysis, much revered and much handled, but in all its freshness and truculent refusal of fiction’s tropes.
Jull Costa and Patterson also offer the superior translation. The language is honed and specific, effortless yet charged with feeling, where Thomson-DeVeaux’s version can feel mustier and blurry.
Here is Thomson-DeVeaux on Brás Cubas’s evocation of his childhood: “What matters is a general view of the domestic sphere, which is hereby set out — vulgar characters, a love of hubbub and ostentatious appearances, a weakness of will, the unchallenged reign of whims and fancies, and all the rest. From that earth and that manure was this flower born.”
The Jull Costa and Patterson version: “What matters is the general tone of my home life, and, as I have said, this consisted in a basic vulgarity of character, a love of glittering appearances, noise and disorder, a general weakness of will, the triumph of the capricious and so forth. It was from that soil and from that dung that this flower was born.”
How powerfully the narrator inhabits the second series of sentences. There is the immediate peevishness — “as I have said,” he reminds us, and we can hear the pinch in his voice (compare it with the odd, lawyerly “hereby set out” in Thomson-DeVeaux). There is the atmosphere he experiences as an assault on his senses and person; you feel the harshness of the “glittering appearances,” the shrill “noise and disorder,” the oppressive “tone” of the home. All these elements are collapsed and muffled in Thomson-DeVeaux’s impersonal “hubbub” of “the domestic sphere.” There is finally the bluntness of the last line, the “soil” and “dung” that Brás Cubas springs from (as opposed to the milder “earth” and “manure”), which reeks with his fear of contamination by his family, even as the sudden crudeness of his phrasing reveals just how deep his roots run.
Not that he catches on. This is a book of refusals — the hero’s refusal to commit to anything or anyone, his refusal to satisfy conventional narrative expectations, all anchored by his underlying refusal to see himself clearly, even as he presents his life for our inspection.
Willful blindness is a theme in Machado’s work (the easily cuckolded husband is a repeating character). In the case of Brás Cubas, however, blindness is never presented as foolishness or a kind of innocence but as a method of cruelty particular to his caste, the white elite of Rio de Janeiro. In a chilling scene, he witnesses a man he had formerly enslaved and abused now whipping another black man in the square. “He was turning the tables,” Brás Cubas marvels. “He had bought a slave and was paying him, with hefty interest, for all that he had received from me. See what a clever rascal he was!”
I keep turning this scene in my mind like a Rubik’s Cube, wondering at the author’s attitude toward his character. Machado plays the scene lightly. He does not linger, and he remains conspicuously fond of Brás Cubas. But I feel Machado wondering, too, as he peers through the eyes of Brás Cubas. He has not created this man to condemn or reform him but to inhabit his consciousness, and he inhabits him so fully that we see the mechanics of ordinary barbarism, the condescension and reflexive self-absolution.
For a writer with a bottomless bag of tricks, his core achievement is, finally, more humble and infinitely more dazzling than any special effect. It’s not exploring what the novel might be, but looking at people — purely and pitilessly — exactly as they are.
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A Playful Masterpiece That Expanded the Novel’s Possibilities - The New York Times
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