Chapter I: The Author's Death
Section summary
Brás Cubas, a dead author, opens his memoirs at the end because the writing comes out fresher that way. He expired on a Friday in August 1869, at sixty-four years old, single, with about three hundred contos, and eleven friends carried him to the cemetery. At the hour of death were his sister Sabina, married to Cotrim, the couple's daughter, and a third lady still without a name. He says that a grand and useful idea, more than the pneumonia, killed him.
Analysis
Brás opens with death and reckons it like a balance sheet (age, marital status, wealth, number of friends), and the irony falls as much on the speech of nature weeping as on himself, who left twenty bonds to the friend who gave the speech and declares that he has no regrets. What he confesses without intending to is that he measures a life by numbers and by audience.
I am not, properly speaking, a dead author, but an authoring corpse, for whom the grave was another cradle
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Chapter II: The Plaster
Section summary
An idea takes hold of the brain of Brás Cubas and becomes the project of an anti-hypochondriac plaster, presented to the government as a Christian work. Dead, he confesses the main motive: to see his own name printed on everything. His uncles disagree about the love of glory, a ruin for the canon, a more humane face for the soldier, and he leaves the reader to decide.
Analysis
Chapter III: Genealogy
Section summary
Speaking of his uncles, Brás Cubas sketches the genealogy: the cooper Damião Cubas grew rich as a farmer, and his son Luís studied in Coimbra. Brás's father, thinking the surname smelled of cooperage, tried to link himself to the captain-major Brás Cubas and, rebuffed, invented that the "cubas" (vats) came from three hundred taken from the Moors. At the end he introduces his niece Venância and her father, Cotrim.
Analysis
Chapter IV: A Fixed Idea
Section summary
The idea of the plaster has become a fixation, and Brás Cubas warns the reader against it with Cavour, whom the fixed idea of Italian unity killed, and recalls, with Claudius and Lucrezia Borgia, that history is fickle and rehabilitates those it once condemned: the fixed idea makes the strong and the mad, the mobile idea makes the Claudiuses. He defines the book as an uneven philosophy and returns to the plaster.
Analysis
Chapter V: In Which a Lady's Ear Appears
Section summary
Occupied with the plaster, Brás Cubas catches a chill, neglects himself, and concludes that the invention killed him. He then returns to the anonymous woman of chapter I, now fifty-four, and proposes that the reader imagine they loved each other years before. The following chapter names her: Virgília. Brás did not look after himself in time because he had the plaster in his brain, and, seeing himself rise to Heaven like an immortal eagle, he did not feel the pain that gripped him.
Analysis
Chapter VI: Chimène, qui l'eût dit? Rodrigue, qui l'eût cru?
Section summary
Brás Cubas, ill, sees Virgília at the door of the alcove after two years without seeing each other, and longing gives him back the days of his youth. A visitor leaves, the two look at each other without words, and she gets angry when he speaks of dying. To dispel doubts about the house without ladies, Virgília returns two days later with her son, Nhonhô, and speaks with disdain of a friend's illegitimate love affairs; the delirium begins.
Analysis
Chapter VII: Delirium
Section summary
Brás Cubas recounts the twenty or thirty minutes of delirium: he becomes a Chinese barber, then the Summa Theologica, and a hippopotamus takes him to the origin of the centuries. On a snowy plain, an immense figure who calls herself Nature or Pandora, mother and enemy, denies him more years, and from the top of a mountain shows him the parade of the centuries. Brás laughs, and the vision dissolves when the hippopotamus turns into the cat Sultão.
Analysis
Chapter VIII: Reason Against Folly
Section summary
Brás Cubas recounts the return of lucidity as a dispute between Reason, who wants to evict the intruder, and Folly, who asks for ten more minutes for the mystery of life and death. Reason laughs and throws her out. She refuses the request because, tired of giving up attics to her, she knows that Folly wants to move from the attic to the dining room, and from there to the rest of the house.
Analysis
Chapter IX: Transition
Section summary
Brás Cubas displays the greatest transition in the book: the delirium began in the presence of Virgília, Virgília was his great sin of youth, and from there, from boyhood to birth, one arrives at 20 October 1805.
Analysis