The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

I wavered for some time between starting these memoirs with their beginning or with their end, meaning: Should I start with my birth or my death?

These are the first lines of chapter I of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. As an Acute and truthful observer Bras Cubas describes his life in 19th century Brazil. It is the rather uneventful life of a rich bachelor trying but never quite managing to find his place in the life around him. Commenting and analyzing this strangely passive life from the comfortable position of being dead the narrator excels in accurately and openly describing his own states of mind and his observations about the people around him.

We learn about his love for Virgilia, a long affair with a complicated past, his studies in Portugal where he is rescued by a farmer (beautifully describing his thought processes when deciding how much money to give the farmer in order to prove himself thankful), a freed slave whose first action was to buy a slave himself and a mad philosopher whose philosophy he immediately recognizes as the only true one.

Originally published in 1880 the Memoirs are written in an almost drunken, meandering way. The length of the chapters and their style greatly varies, with some chapters composed entirely of dots, chapters addressing the reader directly or notes about a chapter the narrator planned to make but did not quite get to. It is a style fitting to the passive, seldom self controlled life of Bras Cubas and, in the end, very entertaining to read.