Epitaph of a Small Winner     by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Translated by William Grossman Original title: Memórias póstumas de Brás cubas Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £4.95 Not available for ordering Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £4.99 Not available for ordering Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering

Brás Cubas, the ‘small winner’ whose epitaph this novel writes, is an unremarkable man. A well-to-do citizen of Rio de Janeiro, he tries his hand at politics, journalism and romance, conducting a long and much talked-about affair with an acquaintance’s wife. What is remarkable about the novel is its style. After a long illness in 1879 Machado, who had till then been tentatively exploring the relations between Brazil’s different social groups, but within the constraints of Romantic convention, turned to a more subjective, psychological form, the model for which he found in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Like Tristram Shandy, Epitaph of a Small Winner advances not in a straight line but in fits and starts, loops and cutbacks. There is even a ‘chapter which I shall not write,’ a trick taken directly from Sterne. Where Epitaph of a Small Winner differs from Tristram Shandy, though, is in the status of its narrator. Bras Cubas, as he writes, is dead, and his autobiography begins not with his conception but with his demise and burial. This unusual set-up gives the narrative a limitlessness that Machado’s later novel Dom Casmurro, also its main character’s autobiography, lacks. Brás Cubas takes a ride on a hippopotamus to the beginning of the ages and speaks to Nature or Pandora herself, standing beyond all the boundaries of the world he writes about. This limitlessness allows him a cynical relativism, thinly disguised as honest sincerity. within which he can accommodate every cruelty, every hypocrisy with chilling bonhomie. All-encompassing religious or philosophical systems that justify a brutally competitive status quo are mercilessly parodied in Cubas’ grim sophistry, a variation on Pangloss’ ‘all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. At the end of life’s sordid game he has neither gained nor lost anything much (though, as a good child of the slave owning élite, he has been spared the humiliation of working for a living), so he decides that as he hasn’t transmitted his legacy of misery to any descendants, he’s come out a ‘small winner’. TM & DT

How glorious to throw away your cloak, to dump your spangles in a ditch, to unfold yourself, to strip off all your paint and ornaments, to confess plainly what you were and what you failed to be! For, after all, you have no neighbours, no friends, no enemies, no acquaintances, no strangers, no audience at all. The sharp and judicial eye of public opinion loses its power as soon as we enter the territory of death. I do not deny that it sometimes glances this way and examines and judges us, but we dead folk are not concerned about its judgement. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference. 75