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Review
'Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James ... Epitaph of a Small Winner is clearly one of those books which we call definitive. It is there, complete, done: a study of ironic disillusionment couched in the most delicate suavity of despair' New York Times Book Review 'No satirist, not even Swift, is less merciful in his exposure of the pretentiousness and the hypocrisy that lurk in the average good man and woman. Machado, in his deceptively amiable way, is terrifying' New Republic 'A masterpiece of Epicurean irony' New York Times
Product Description
'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 has died and is now writing'. So begins the posthumous memoir of Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian. While the grave may have given Cubas the distance to examine his rather undistinguished life, it has certainly not dampened his sense of humour. Epitaph of a Small Winner is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Benefitting from the hindsight afforded to one who is dead, our hero, Bras Cubas decides to take up a pen and write an account of his life. From the grave. Brutally acerbic, sarcastic and above all honest, Mr Cubas pulls no punches about those he loved, envied and disliked; as he takes uS on a wondrous narrative through his life. But above all, knowing the End has already been met, he is brutally honest about himself and his own failings, in the way ( I imagine) only the dead can be. This novel is light years ahead of its time. Astonishing. (nb: this novel has also been translated under the title 'The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas' published by OUP.)
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
For anybody who doesn't take philosophy at face value! If you want to know where modern Latin American fiction has its roots, look no further. This novel is a cracking read which is also highly insightful. If you are not a Darwinist, a capitalist, a politician, or a human being you may feel free to read it without fear of being unsettled. In its category, this novel is second only to 'Dom Casmurro,' by the same author. And the introduction is by Louis de Bernieres, no less.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
59 of 73 people found the following review helpful
Great book! But make sure you avoid this edition.
27 April 2000
Format:Paperback
"Epitaph of a Small Winner" is NOT the title of this book. The original title, "Memorias Posthumas de Bras Cubas," can only be accurately translated as "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." Why did they give this edition of the book such a weird title? I don't know--probably for the same reason that they didn't translate it well! I read this translation of the book, because the foreward by Susan Sontag led me to believe it would be the best. But though it wasn't awful, it was sufficiently awkward that I had to force my way through it. Granted, I enjoyed the book, because Machado de Assis is a superb master of comic narrative, inverting into parody just about every literary convention of his nineteenth century. But think how much MORE I would have enjoyed it if I had known that there was another translation of the book, which, far from awkward, was masterful and elegant, by the acclaimed translator Gregory Rabassa (of One Hundred Years of Solitude fame). Also to its credit, that other translation correctly renders the title as "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." So don't make the mistake I made: don't waste your time with any other editions, like the lame-ass one on this page. (I make due apologies to Susan Sontag.) Move your buns over to the page for "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." And relax! Machado de Assis was an ingenious author, prefiguring such diverse talents as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, John Barth, and even Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. If you like them, you're going to like him.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
"Lifelong Wastrel Kicks a Goal at Last"
30 Dec 2000
Format:Paperback
Brazil has produced a number of wonderful novels. I can name "Rebellion in the Backlands" by Euclides da Cunha, "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" by João Guimaraes Rosa, "The Tent of Miracles" and "Gabriela; Clove and Cinnamon" by Jorge Amado, and "The Three Marias" by Rachel de Queiroz, but these are only a few. You have to add to this list at least a couple novels by J. M. Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest writer of the 19th century, (he died in 1908) and one of the greatest writing anywhere at that time. EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER would be on that list for sure. I can hear you say, "Can you really compare this fellow to writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Zola, Melville, Austen, or Eliot ?" My answer would be "yes" and "no". That's because I like definite answers. Sorry, just kidding. I would say "no" because Machado de Assis doesn't write like any of the others. His style is unique and his choice of perspective also. He is the opposite of a realist. He never hits you over the head with any serious descriptive narrative. His characters speak throughout. So, how could you compare him effectively with the others ? But, I would say "yes" because he is a master of subtle story telling, of wit, satire, and irony. This novel, like his others, does not resemble any other work. He is certainly among the greats.
Braz Cubas, the narrator of the novel, is already dead when we meet him. So he has plenty of time to tell about his life. As he notes, "death does not age one"; he can afford to ramble a bit. What we receive, through his life story, is a satirized view of the indolence and lack of intellectual rigor of the Brazilian upper class of the time. We read the life of a man who did nothing at all in 64 years. Or almost nothing. He didn't study, he didn't work, he didn't marry, and he didn't have any direction. He became a parliamentary deputy through connections and did absolutely nothing while there. He enjoyed the physical pleasures of life, he envied others, he had ambitions that he did next to nothing to fulfill. He failed at nearly everything, then at last he croaked. The reason why he feels (from beyond the grave) that he wasn't such a loser after all is the author's final bit of irony. Machado de Assis employs his usual style---160 short chapters in 223 pages---with the title of each chapter used to spice up the progress of the novel, which in turn is full of irony, with, whimsy, and very clever writing, full of ingenious metaphors. You cannot say that this is a "page turner" in any conventional sense. It is rather philosophical, but as the author says, "a philosophy wanting in uniformity, now austere, now playful...." To quote from chapter 124, which is all of 9 lines long---"To hop from a character study to an epitaph may be realistic and even commonplace, but the reader probably would not have taken refuge in this book if he had not wished to escape the realistic and the commonplace." That is my recommendation to you. Escape both the realistic and the commonplace and read this book. You won't regret it.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Superb evocation of cosmic comedy
12 Dec 1998
Format:Paperback
Machado de Assis has written a book for cynics everywhere--the narrator comically and gleefully smashes virtually every sacred cow you can think of, even mocking his own incipent death. The effect is not one of tragedy, however, but liberation through comedy--one of the funniest books I've ever read, universal in its appeal.
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