08/05/2024, 01:05 A Playful Masterpiece That Expanded the Novel’s Possibilities - The New York Times

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Playful Masterpiece That Expanded the Novel’s

Possibilities
By Parul Sehgal
June 16, 2020

A new translation of Machado de Assis’

“The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás
Cubas” by Margaret Jull Costa and
Robin Patterson.
.

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.

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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.

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A new translation of Machado de Assis’

“The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás
Cubas” by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux.
.

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.”
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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.”

Machado de Assis
National Library of Brazil

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!”
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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.

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

By Machado de Assis
Translated by Flora Thomson-
DeVeaux
324 pages. Penguin Classics. $17.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

By Machado de Assis
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
239 pages. Liveright. $27.95.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Crossing Over to the Other Side on a
Hippo

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