The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
"To the first worm that gnawed on my flesh, I dedicate these posthumous memoirs as a fond remembrance." So opens the autobiography of Brás Cubas, a wealthy, idle Rio de Janeiro gentleman who announces on his first page that he is dead, and that death has finally given him the freedom to tell his own story without the vanities the living cannot help indulging. What follows is his life told from beyond the grave: a comfortable, unremarkable existence of failed ambitions, a broken engagement, a long adulterous love affair with the wife of a rising politician, and an invention, an anti-hypochondria plaster, that never quite makes him the fortune or the fame he was certain it would.

Brás Cubas narrates all of this in short, digressive chapters, some barely a paragraph long, addressing the reader directly, arguing with himself about what to include, and undercutting his own dignity at every turn with the candor only a dead man can afford. There is no great crime in his story and no great virtue either, only the ordinary vanities, self-deceptions, and small cruelties of a man who never had to answer for any of it, which is precisely the point Machado de Assis is making about the class Brás Cubas belonged to and the country that indulged it.

Published in 1881, drawing openly on Laurence Sterne's digressive, reader-addressing style, the novel broke sharply from the naturalism fashionable at the time and is now regarded as one of the most original achievements in nineteenth-century fiction, the book that established Machado de Assis as Brazil's greatest novelist. This new translation presents the complete novel, read in full.