Introduction

'To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse I dedicate these posthumous memoirs as a fond remembrance.' The narrator of this novel is a dead man: Brás Cubas, a rich young gentleman of Rio de Janeiro who died of pneumonia at sixty-four, and who decides to write his life from the grave. He begins with his own funeral, then looks back on his spoiled childhood, the degree he idled his way to at Coimbra in Portugal, his first love for the courtesan Marcela, his long affair with the married Virgília, his failed bids for a seat in parliament and to invent an 'anti-melancholy plaster', and his friend Quincas Borba, a madman who has founded his own philosophy, 'Humanitism'. The book is made of a hundred and sixty short chapters, some a single sentence, one nothing but dots, and the narrator keeps stepping out to tease the reader. The last chapter is 'Of Negatives': he concludes that the one positive result of his life is that he had no children and 'transmitted to no creature the legacy of our misery'. The novel inaugurated Brazilian realism.