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John Mauro's Reviews > The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
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by
In the Foreword to The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Dave Eggers writes:
"Wit leaps centuries and hemispheres. It does not collect dust, and, when done right, it does not age. You are holding one of the wittiest, most playful, and therefore most alive and ageless books ever written. It is a love story—many love stories, really—and it's a comedy of class and manners and ego, and it's a reflection on a nation and a time, and an unflinching look at mortality, and all the while it's an intimate and ecstatic exploration of storytelling itself. It is a glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read."
An overexuberant summary of a book that can only be described as overexuberant in its own storytelling.
The basic setup is that Brás Cubas is dead and has written his memoirs from the grave. Since he is dead, he can give a brutally unvarnished account of his life and the society in which he lived.
The book consists of over 150 very short chapters. The narrator repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing the reader with humorous and often self-deprecating remarks. The lighthearted humor is offset by a pervasive sense of sadness and emptiness throughout the book.
This is essentially a post-modern tragicomedy written a century head of its time (1881). Some of the techniques employed by the author include:
1. A chapter called "Uselessness" that consists only of a single sentence: "But, either I am very much mistaken, or I have just written a useless chapter."
2. A chapter meant to be inserted between the first two sentences of the previous chapter, as an edit to that chapter.
3. A chapter consisting only of ellipses.
4. A chapter written as the script for a play, but where all the dialogue has been replaced by ellipses.
That should give you a representative sampling of the humor that you will find in this book. It's funny and definitely well ahead of its time. However, I found that the repetitive style of humor wore thin over the course of the novel.
The story itself is nothing special. It's a fairly typical love story and social criticism told by an overly self-conscious narrator. The novelty of the The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is not in the story, but rather in the inventiveness and playfulness of its form.
Overall rating = 4 stars. (5 stars for creativity, 3 stars for the story.)
"Wit leaps centuries and hemispheres. It does not collect dust, and, when done right, it does not age. You are holding one of the wittiest, most playful, and therefore most alive and ageless books ever written. It is a love story—many love stories, really—and it's a comedy of class and manners and ego, and it's a reflection on a nation and a time, and an unflinching look at mortality, and all the while it's an intimate and ecstatic exploration of storytelling itself. It is a glittering masterwork and an unmitigated joy to read."
An overexuberant summary of a book that can only be described as overexuberant in its own storytelling.
The basic setup is that Brás Cubas is dead and has written his memoirs from the grave. Since he is dead, he can give a brutally unvarnished account of his life and the society in which he lived.
The book consists of over 150 very short chapters. The narrator repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing the reader with humorous and often self-deprecating remarks. The lighthearted humor is offset by a pervasive sense of sadness and emptiness throughout the book.
This is essentially a post-modern tragicomedy written a century head of its time (1881). Some of the techniques employed by the author include:
1. A chapter called "Uselessness" that consists only of a single sentence: "But, either I am very much mistaken, or I have just written a useless chapter."
2. A chapter meant to be inserted between the first two sentences of the previous chapter, as an edit to that chapter.
3. A chapter consisting only of ellipses.
4. A chapter written as the script for a play, but where all the dialogue has been replaced by ellipses.
That should give you a representative sampling of the humor that you will find in this book. It's funny and definitely well ahead of its time. However, I found that the repetitive style of humor wore thin over the course of the novel.
The story itself is nothing special. It's a fairly typical love story and social criticism told by an overly self-conscious narrator. The novelty of the The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is not in the story, but rather in the inventiveness and playfulness of its form.
Overall rating = 4 stars. (5 stars for creativity, 3 stars for the story.)
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Reading Progress
December 25, 2021
– Shelved as:
to-read
December 25, 2021
– Shelved
May 9, 2022
–
Started Reading
May 9, 2022
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Finished Reading
