Machado de Assis
Paperback | Pages: 165 pages Rating: 4.24 | 15463 Users | 662 Reviews
Details Epithetical Books Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
| Title | : | Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas |
| Author | : | Machado de Assis |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 165 pages |
| Published | : | January 31st 2005 by Luso-Brazilian Books (first published 1881) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Cultural. Brazil |
Relation As Books Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
a sick chicken and the voluptuousness of misery we read an author and wonder 'how is it possible that this genius is not known?'... yes, only a species as cretinous as ours could ignore machado. along with carpentier and mutis, he takes the top 'what the fuck' spot. here are three reasons machado must be read, must not be forgotten: 1) as karen pointed out below: "18fucking80". yup. madman machado wrote a modernist masterpiece way back when. joyce and woolf? they don't have shit on machado. nothing. in this hysterical and darkdarkdark nuthouse you get the narrator's crazy drawings (i ripped out the pages and stuck 'em on the wall next to my desk), made-up words, demented philosophical systems, aphorisms, chapters that describe their own uselessness, chapters asking to be inserted within the text of other chapters, and wonderful sections in which the narrator commands us to disregard the text, that he's full of shit, that he's overwritten something to make it sound more literary. yeah. check out the entirety of chapter 45: "Sobs, tears, an improvised altar with saints and crucifix, black curtains on the walls, strips of black velvet framing an entrance, a man who came to dress the corpse, another man who took the measurements for the coffin; candelabra, the coffin on a table covered with gold-and-black silk with candles at the corners, invitations, guests who entered slowly with muffled step and pressed the hand of each member of the family, some of them sad, all of them serious and silent, priest, sacristan, prayers, sprinkling of holy water, the closing of the coffin with hammer and nails; six persons who removes the coffin from the table, lift it, carry it, with difficulty, down the stairs despite the cries, sobs, and new tears of the family, walk with it to the hearse, place it on the slab, strap it securely with leather thongs; the rolling of the hearse, the rolling of the carriages one by one… These are the notes that I took for a sad and commonplace chapter which I shall not write." 2) because all the modernist shit isn't there for it's own sake. it's in service of a wildly original and terrific book. and if it wasn't written by a black brazilian in the 19th century, but by a white 20 yr old in 2009, it'd still be great. (of course, there'd be a Machado backlash in which he'd be accused of gimmickry and unoriginality and being overly clever and blahblah) i don't laugh from books. i don't like funny books. machado forces me to take back both those statements. salman rushdie: 'the kind of humor that makes skulls smile.' check this exfuckingtraordinary excerpt, a veritable fuckfest of humor and tragedy: "'Tis good to be sad and say nothing'… I remember that I was sitting under a tamarind tree, with the poet's book open in my hands and my spirit as crestfallen as a sick chicken. I pressed my silent grief to my breast and experienced a curious feeling, something that might be called the voluptuousness of misery. Voluptuousness of misery. Memorize the phrase, reader; store it away, take it out and study it from time to time, and, if you do not succeed in understanding it, you may conclude that you have missed one of the most subtle emotions of which man is capable.'" ahhhh! headbashingly great stuff! 3) susan sontag. karen brissette. two tough chicks, one dead & one alive, who push the shit outta machado. woody allen is a machado fan. as is carlos fuentes, salman rushdie, javier marias, and harold bloom. and sontag's introduction is, as always, a must read. she makes the interesting point that latin america produced such far-seeing and interesting literature not merely because the dictatorships tyrannies and repressive regimes produced a literature of 'pressure', but because the latin americans were those who were most enamored by laurence sterne... damn. i've really gotta read tristam shandy. enough said. you know what to do.Specify Books Conducive To Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
| Original Title: | Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas |
| ISBN: | 0850515025 (ISBN13: 9780850515022) |
| Edition Language: | Portuguese |
| Characters: | Brás Cubas, Virgília, Lobo Neves, Quincas Borba |
| Setting: | Rio de Janeiro(Brazil) |
Rating Epithetical Books Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
Ratings: 4.24 From 15463 Users | 662 ReviewsWeigh Up Epithetical Books Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas
"You are alive: I wish you no other calamity." (18)It is difficult to believe/accept that this was written in 1880. There is a blurb on the front cover of my copy of David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, which I've always found particularly annoying and off-putting. Zadie Smith gushes: "A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him." If that can be said of DFW, then one can only imagine the superlatives that should be"Posthumous", not because it was published after the author's death, but because Bras Cubas wrote his memoirs after he died. This is a 19th century work so it's supposed to be the original. Problem is, it didn't come as new to me, having read before the 20th century bestseller "Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold where a murdered girl narrates.There are similarities here with Machado de Assis' other masterpiece, "Dom Casmurro", both in the manner the narrators ended up (alone) and their principal
I wrote it with a playful pen and melancholy ink and it isnt hard to foresee what can come out of that marriage. I might add that serious people will find some semblance of a normal novel, while frivolous people wont find their usual one here. There it stands, deprived of the esteem of the serious and the love of the frivolous, the two main pillars of opinion.Although The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas are written in a very frolicsome manner the book is abundant in precise and deep
I have not read anything by Machado de Assis before, though I've been wanting to. He was a prolific author that, strangely, not a lot of people have heard about, and I'm not sure why. He wrote The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in 1881, but if you picked this up without realizing that and just read it now, you would likely it think it had actually been written in the last fifty years.There's a freshness to his writing that holds up well today. I was nervous at first because I knew it was only
How could I not want to read this?First, there is the absolutely gorgeous jacket design, including this painting, Young Man with a Pen by Diego Rivera:Second, Mike Puma recommended this. Mike is the go-to guy for Latin American literature.And then, in an introduction (by Bras Cubas), the author announces that he has "adopted the free-form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre" in the writing of these Memoirs.Well, saddle me up and call me Tristram.Machado de Assis has indeed captured Sterne, down
I would very much like to read this again in the afterlife preferably without the four cups of coffee galivanting through my nervous system. Thank you very much.
0 Comments