It is worth it for readers who enjoy the narrator and small scenes more than plot twists. Quincas Borba tells the fall of an heir in 201 short chapters, half of them under three hundred words, and the narrator laughs at nearly all of them, sparing no one.
What the book offers the reader is a clear plot (a teacher inherits a fortune, goes to Rio, desires his friend's wife, and goes mad) and characters who reveal themselves in sentences. Sofia's eyes are compared to a "lantern of an inn in which there were no rooms for guests." Palha's soul is a patchwork quilt, and the narrator defends it: "morally, whole quilts are so rare." In the end, the narrator refuses to close the meaning and tells the reader to weep or laugh.
What may get in the way is the doctrine of Humanitas, abstract, which the philosopher explains in chapter VI with the allegory of the starving tribes and which Rubião understands little. The action also takes place between 1867 and 1871, in the Empire, with the Paraguayan War, ministries and Napoleon III, and many references sound distant today. The chapters have no titles, only numbers.
It is not necessary to have read the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas beforehand: in chapter IV the narrator introduces the philosopher again to those who have not read the other book, as "that same castaway of existence." And the novel was read in its own time: the prologue of the third edition says that the second "sold out more quickly than the first."