Site Navigation Menu
Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.
For April 14, Coté will read aloud from Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.
“One of the wittiest, most playful, and . . . most alive and ageless books ever written.” –Dave Eggers, The New Yorker
A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas.
Summary: The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil’s most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie.
In his masterpiece, the 1880 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir.
In his memoir, Braz Cubas, the 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.
He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and halfhearted political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave.
A clear forerunner of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, Epitaph for a Small Winner is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history as well as “one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature” (Salman Rushdie).
Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.
Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.
Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net
