Epitaph of a Small Winner - Posthumous memoirs of Braz Cubas

Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Farrar Straus Giroux

2008

209 páginas

6h 58m

ISBN-10: 0374531234

In these memoirs, Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian, examines (from beyond the grave) his rather undistinguished life in 160 short chapters that are filled with philosophical digressions and exuberant insights. A clear forerunner of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, Epitaph for a Small Winner, first published in 1880, is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history as well as "one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature" (Salman Rushdie).

"I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who had died and is now writing." So begins the posthumous memoir of Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian. Though the grave has given Cubas the distance to examine his rather undistinguished life, it has not dampened his sense of humor. In the tradition of Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shamdy, Epitaph of a Small Winner is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history.