Chapter CXXXIX, “How I Didn’t Get to Be Minister of State,” contains only a few blank lines. The reader, probably surprised by a short, empty chapter, may decide to go on to the following chapter, CXL, “Which Explains the Previous One,” only to find these opening words: “There are things that are better said in silence. Unsuccessful ambitious people will understand it.” The suggestion is clear: if you want to understand the narrator’s silence in Chapter CXXXIX, you will have to consider your own failures. For some readers, this may seem threatening, for we are reminded of our own frustrated ambitions for power, and nobody likes to acknowledge, however fleetingly, having ever been a loser.

These narrative tricks were uncommon in the usually romantic or realist nineteenth-century novels. Yet, they were not entirely new; English-language readers will be reminded of strategies employed by the eighteenth-century British writer Laurence Sterne in his still-hilarious Tristram Shandy, and the narrator Brás Cubas himself acknowledges in a foreword to the reader that he appropriated Sterne’s “free-form” style for his memoirs. What is new, as he also warns the reader, is that to this usually comical form he will attach “a few fretful touches of pessimism” of his own. In an old-fashioned yet unforgettable metaphor, he tells us that he wrote his book with a playful pen, “a pena da galhofa” the pen of irreverent laughter—suggesting that this would certainly make his work light and funny. But he immediately adds that the ink well in which he dipped his pen contained “a tinta da melancolia” melancholy ink—thereby indelibly attaching to his laughter a more somber hue. This admixture of laughter and seriousness, intimately blended into the same thought or action, is an unusual and dangerous recipe for a novel: “one can readily foresee what may come of such a marriage,” he concludes.

Brás Cubas is aware of the danger of mingling seriousness with amusement when vying for favorable public opinion. His book, he tells us, may have only five readers. Serious readers will probably dislike it, seeing in it only the pure fiction of a nonrealistic novel, while frivolous readers will not find in it the entertainment they crave. Thus, he adds, this book runs the risk of being deprived both of the pompous esteem of the serious and of the superficial infatuation of the frivolous. According to Brás Cubas, these are “the two main pillars” of public opinion. Some readers may be offended by his words. After all, seriousness is not always pompous, entertainment not always frivolous; and we readers, as an important part of public opinion, do not appreciate criticism from anyone, least of all a dead man.

A historical interpretation will remind us that when Machado de Assis was writing this book in Brazil in 1880 the country was still a monarchy, slavery had not yet been abolished, and only a small fraction of the population—the elite—were literate. In such an unequal society, his few potential readers would tend to go along with the mores of their times, a morality based on favoritism, patronage, and its attendant hypocrisy. In such a society, as we can easily imagine, the main practical virtues had to be social conformity and the cultivation of appearances. So perhaps we can excuse Brás Cubas’ apparent insolence on the grounds that he is criticizing others, not us.

Yet, some readers will not be convinced by this historical explanation, since our times do not seem to be that different; disrespecting public opinion remains a daring attitude. Conformity and cultivation of appearances are still considered sure recipes for success. Perception, public opinion, and “image-building” have arguably attained today the axiomatic status of political principle and even scientific dogma. By questioning accepted ideas, this book forces the perplexed reader to reexamine his or her own opinions, and ask him or herself: When I read this book, should I laugh or should I cry? With its seriocomic questioning of conventional ideas, this book is a subtle antidote to the power we ascribe to public opinion and the accompanying cultivation of appearances.

One of the conventions challenged by Brás Cubas is the traditional form of the novel itself. Nineteenth-century novels usually represent life through a convincing plot and a smooth and captivating narrative into which the reader is passively drawn and pulled along. In presenting to the reader the supposedly real-life actions and feelings of the characters, the author pretends to be absent from the text. Brás Cubas disrupts these realistic conventions with his frequent observations about his book and its style. In Chapter LXXI, for example, he makes a startling accusation: “the main defect of this book is you, reader.” As if to explain his shocking statement, he adds: “You’re in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration … and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble and fall …” Displaying once more his self-conscious and self-deprecating sense of humor, Brás Cubas is clearly warning the readers—mostly those who are used to action-packed, fast-paced plots presented in straightforward narrative—that his book is indeed very different from a traditional nineteenth-century novel. His book is intended for readers who prefer “reflection” to “anecdotes,” despite Brás Cubas’ ironic comment to the contrary in Chapter IV. In this sense, these posthumous memoirs are a remarkably modern book.

Other important conventions are also challenged in these memoirs. Critical readers will not miss the way in which, from the first chapter on, Brás Cubas ironically unveils the artificiality of the “pathetic fallacy”—the attribution of human feelings to inanimate nature—one of the basic artistic conventions of nineteenth-century romanticism still alive today in our culture. Describing his funeral, Brás Cubas tells us about the weather: it was raining—drizzling—and this fact of nature led one of his “last-minute faithful friends” to insert an “ingenious idea” into his eulogy, something like “nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with.” To this flourish Brás Cubas adds, in the next paragraph: “Good and faithful friend! No, I don’t regret the twenty bonds I left you.”

This acerbic unmasking of the petty side of human motivations hiding behind a romantic convention does not mean, however, that these memoirs follow the other dominant schools of art in the nineteenth century, realism and naturalism.