PinT Book Club 16th session

Welcome to the 16th meeting of PinT Book Club! Join us to discuss The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Brazilian author Machado de Assis, our first classic to be discussed. We will be joined by translator Flora Thomson DeVeaux. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese).

This translation of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas was published in 2021 by Penguin Books.

About the book

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas.

Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and half-hearted political ambitions, serves up hare-brained philosophies and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave.

Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to works by Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (born June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — died September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, and short-story writer, a classic master of Brazilian literature, whose art is rooted in the traditions of European culture and transcends the influence of Brazilian literary schools.

Among his novels, Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas are acknowledged masterpieces of world literature. If he had written in French instead of Portuguese, it has been said, he would today be universally recognized as the equal of Flaubert and Hugo.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux is a translator, writer, and researcher whose translation of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis was acclaimed as “a gift to scholars” by The New York Times. She studied Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University and earned a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University. She lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Praise for THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS:

"A glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read . . . It is wholly original and unlike anything other than the many books that came after it and seem to have knowingly or not borrowed from it. . . . This translation is a glorious gift to the world, because it sparkles, because it sings, because it's very funny and manages to capture Machado's inimitable tone, at once mordant and wistful, self-lacerating and romantic"

— Dave Eggers

"A writer a hundred years ahead of his time . . . If Borges is the writer who made García Márquez possible, then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado de Assis is the writer who made Borges possible"

— Salman Rushdie

"One of those thrillingly original, radically skeptical books that will always impress readers with the force of private discovery."

— Susan Sontag

"Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881? . . . Machado's book represents the moment when the novel learned to dance. . . . Flora Thomson-DeVeaux's edition is a gift to scholars . . . [Brás Cubas is] superb company"

— The New York Times