I have read a novel by Machado de Assis, “Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas”. It is a story for people who love literary nonsense contaminated by magic realism, which is prominent in Latin American literature such as novels of Julio Cortázar. There is a theme for “Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas”, but it is in some sense decomposed in nonsense patching of short stories. Socio-politically it is a Brazilian story of the 19th century, and literary-historically it is a masterpiece of Brazilian literature comparable to European classics. A same-old story of trifling adultery is converted to such an avant-garde story by very frequent comical jumping of the line of story to a point to another point, and significances to the deaths of characters appearing, obviously predicted by the title. Through the life of Brás Cubas, one can imagine the whole sum of his life, not so beautiful but ridiculous ended up with zero sum (despite a bit of surplus). It is nothing to do with enhancement of life and propagation of human values as is the case for most of the human beings. The organization of the story is totally a mess and it leads to post-structuralism or postmodernism in the later ages. Subjective views from the main character and contaminated magic realisms invest insincerity to the story, and it silently shows ridiculous nature of the life of human beings. What are not described are as mentioned, enhancement of life and propagation of human values, similar to Thomas Bernhard’s “Auslöschung. Ein Zerfall”.
From the viewpoint of structuralism balances are established as this is supposed to be a memoir of deceased person, and the plot is almost in a chaos. From the viewpoint of post-structuralism the story is decomposing as if it reflects the decomposing of the main character’s mind during his death. There is a pseudo-philosophy, and chaotic emotions, accompanied by lack of fluidity of knowledge. There are a lot of intertextual elements against European classics. All the faults of the main character ended up in a certain ending.
Overall, it is a masterpiece for people who would like to entrust ones’ minds to the story teller, shifting the lines back and forth.
