Rating: 
Summary: A strange and wonderful book
Review: "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" is a landmark of 19th century Brazilian fiction. The original Portuguese version by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been rendered into an engaging English by translator Gregory Rabassa.The book's hero, Bras Cubas, is a sort of lovable loser who narrates his own life from beyond the grave. The book is divided up into 160 short chapters, some less than a page long. As the story unfolds we meet a colorful cast of characters: Bras Cubas himself, his beloved Virgilia, the slave Prudencio, the strange philosopher Quincas Borba, and many more. Throughout the novel, Machado de Assis (through his fictional narrator) continually plays games with the conventions of fiction and autobiography. Whether he is instructing the reader to insert Chapter CXXX "between the first and second sentences of Chapter CXXIX" or critiquing his own writing style, Cubas/Machado de Assis is full of surprises that make this novel a literary house of mirrors. And throughout the novel the reader encounters passages of poetic depth and psychological insight. Despite being more than 100 years old, this book has an amazingly modern feel to it. This is a major work in the great tradition of South American fiction.
Rating:
Summary: A strange and wonderful book
Review: "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" is a landmark of 19th century Brazilian fiction. The original Portuguese version by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been rendered into an engaging English by translator Gregory Rabassa. The book's hero, Bras Cubas, is a sort of lovable loser who narrates his own life from beyond the grave. The book is divided up into 160 short chapters, some less than a page long. As the story unfolds we meet a colorful cast of characters: Bras Cubas himself, his beloved Virgilia, the slave Prudencio, the strange philosopher Quincas Borba, and many more. Throughout the novel, Machado de Assis (through his fictional narrator) continually plays games with the conventions of fiction and autobiography. Whether he is instructing the reader to insert Chapter CXXX "between the first and second sentences of Chapter CXXIX" or critiquing his own writing style, Cubas/Machado de Assis is full of surprises that make this novel a literary house of mirrors. And throughout the novel the reader encounters passages of poetic depth and psychological insight. Despite being more than 100 years old, this book has an amazingly modern feel to it. This is a major work in the great tradition of South American fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Ahead of its time
Review: Although most people identify Brazilian literature with the vivid regionalism of Jorge Amado or (more recently) the mystical blabber of Paulo Coelho, Brazilian critics have long hailed Machado de Assis as the country's greatest writer and with good reason. This book is vivid proof of Machado's genius: deeply perceptive of human nature as in much of his work, but also radically innovative in style, displaying many traces of modernism some 30 - 40 years ahead of time. How else to characterize the chapter on the "Ancient Dialogue between Adam and Eve" (LV), written solely with punctuation? Or the one-sentence "useless" chapter (CXXXVI): "Unless I'm very much mistaken, I've just written an utterly useless chapter." The style is not without substance. Machado's trenchant insights on human nature and unabashed social criticism are brilliantly displayed in this work. Machado's own view of the book was that it was too serious and deep for the frivolous and too playful and radical for the erudite readers of the time, and concluded in his usual pessimism that it would have "perhaps five" readers. Since the book continues to accumulate "fives and fives" of readers, perhaps humankind, like the flawed Brás Cubas, is also a "small winner" after all. Factoid about the chapter size: As other reviewers noted, the book has numerous short chapters. One chief reason for this was that Machado was afflicted by epileptic attacks and could not write for extended periods.
Rating: 
Summary: 200 hundred pages without a single captivating paragraph
Review: Brazil have certainly produced fantastic writers, but I fail to miss to point of this book or what the author wanted to convey. The drama feels artifical and the "humor" can only be described as lame. If the reader is looking for some type of description of the XIX century customs and ambiance of the brazilian lifestyle, he/she will also end up being very dissapointed since the atmosphere only provides with bits and pieces, which are the barely minimum to locate the reader in the space and time of the novel. Frankly your money will be spended better in other book.
Rating:
Summary: This is one of the best books I ever read.
Review: I am a Brazilian professor and I read in English, Spanish, Italian and French. I rate this book with the best novels of Flaubert, Mann, Lampedusa, Dickens, Balzac and others. It is a superb account of life in 19th Century Rio de Janeiro, a masterpiece of a writer whose only sin was writing in an almost unknown language: portuguese!
Rating:
Summary: One of the great books of western literature.
Review: I cannot understand the review that claims not to have found a single interesting paragraph in a book that is dedicated to "The worm that first ate of my corpse's cold meat." Though I haven't read the translation, the book itself is one of the best ever written. It is also, for its very uniqueness, a must for anyone attempting to understand the literature and culture of Brazil, not only at the start of the XX century, but also at the turn of the XXI.
Rating:
Summary: Just to subdue the acolades
Review: I sometimes wonder why a reviewer will trash a book in the presence of so many positive reviews. Maybe there are readers out there who just like to be contrarians for the sake of being contrarians. How dull. This book is so good, I wrote my college thesis on it. I cannot count the number of times I have read it over the years. Why all the fuss? First, I suppose in 2001 this book might seem tame and trite. Joyce, Proust, Mann, Faulkner, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, Pynchon, etc have already come and gone. Now days, it might seem totally uninteresting for a dead person to narrate a book, or for the author to purposely lie and mislead the reader, and for those readers who like their books "Serious" it might be annoying for the narrator to crack jokes, make fun of everyone, and otherwise disrupt the whole solemnity of reading a "great book." Bah humbug! This book was published in 1881, when the continentals were all reading and imitating Zola and the English speakers were all reading and imitating Henry James. This book amazingly snubs the whole "realist-naturalist" aesthetic. Why can't the narrator be a liar? Why does the narrator have to "show not tell?" From a historical point of view, Machado de Assis is impressively original and independent in his style, obviously influenced by those innocent and flabby 18th century English novels by Fielding and Sterne. But for those who inspect closely, there is even an amazing amount of social criticism going on in this book: Roberto Schwartz, a Brazilian critic, has analyzed Machado de Assis's books as social criticism extensively. For the interested, his writings might be worth a peak. Finally, after having been forced to view "literature" as a serious, high-brow concern my whole life, this book was a refreshing read: finally a relaxed, funny, light read that didn't stoop to be base, shallow, are insulting at the same time. At an age when I desperately needed to be reminded of it, this book reminded me that we read to be entertained. And the best books are those that entertain over and over again without going stale. The worst books are those that come across as stale on the first read. Amazingly, a lot of books that I was trying to read because they were on my college professors' "great books" lists now strike me as amazingly stale. This book continues to entertain, however.
Rating:
Summary: Just to subdue the acolades
Review: I sometimes wonder why a reviewer will trash a book in the presence of so many positive reviews. Maybe there are readers out there who just like to be contrarians for the sake of being contrarians. How dull. This book is so good, I wrote my college thesis on it. I cannot count the number of times I have read it over the years. Why all the fuss? First, I suppose in 2001 this book might seem tame and trite. Joyce, Proust, Mann, Faulkner, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, Pynchon, etc have already come and gone. Now days, it might seem totally uninteresting for a dead person to narrate a book, or for the author to purposely lie and mislead the reader, and for those readers who like their books "Serious" it might be annoying for the narrator to crack jokes, make fun of everyone, and otherwise disrupt the whole solemnity of reading a "great book." Bah humbug! This book was published in 1881, when the continentals were all reading and imitating Zola and the English speakers were all reading and imitating Henry James. This book amazingly snubs the whole "realist-naturalist" aesthetic. Why can't the narrator be a liar? Why does the narrator have to "show not tell?" From a historical point of view, Machado de Assis is impressively original and independent in his style, obviously influenced by those innocent and flabby 18th century English novels by Fielding and Sterne. But for those who inspect closely, there is even an amazing amount of social criticism going on in this book: Roberto Schwartz, a Brazilian critic, has analyzed Machado de Assis's books as social criticism extensively. For the interested, his writings might be worth a peak. Finally, after having been forced to view "literature" as a serious, high-brow concern my whole life, this book was a refreshing read: finally a relaxed, funny, light read that didn't stoop to be base, shallow, are insulting at the same time. At an age when I desperately needed to be reminded of it, this book reminded me that we read to be entertained. And the best books are those that entertain over and over again without going stale. The worst books are those that come across as stale on the first read. Amazingly, a lot of books that I was trying to read because they were on my college professors' "great books" lists now strike me as amazingly stale. This book continues to entertain, however.
Rating:
Summary: A magnificent book
Review: Machado de Assis is one of the most important brazilian authors, without a shadow of doubt. And Bras Cubas is Machado at his best, in a work that is ageless. From a light humour for those who just scan the surface of it, to a superb outside view of society to those willing to read between the lines and reflect about it.
Rating:
Summary: A Joyful Masterpiece
Review: Machado de Assis! What can a say??? I was born in Brazil after all. It is really a shame that my comrade and also a reviewer: Leonardo Motta, a disciple of David Hume and Sigismund (C.S. Lewis' satirical nickname of Freud in the "Pilgrim's Regress" ) previously said "Corruption, frustrated love, cheats: this is what this book is all about." . Well Mr., that's YOUR way of looking at things, YOUR world view. You sound just like Carl Sagan and all those skeptics who are skeptics about everything except THEIR OWN skepticism (and there lies the first contradiction). Well of coarse, this philosophical debate is out of the scope of this review.
Now, about Machado de Assis? what could I say. He was born into extreme poverty, his mother was sort of portuguese and his father sort of black (I apologize for my vocabulary limitations :-). Despite of all his health problems and the inferiority complex he had, (he was about 2.5/8 black - that meant prejudice expressed outward and inward) He came to be the greatest Brazilian writer of the 19th century. His writing style differs from the hall of fame writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (who could articule the complexity of human nature describing feelings that even I wasn't aware of their existence) in both prose and point of view (perspective). His works certainly stand on their own (just like Fernado Pessoa). That's why he is regarded as great and certainly he could easily cast shadow on all the Brazilian Mordenism writers when compared with them. And I really mean ALL!!!
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