The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, published in serial form in the Revista Brasileira from March 1880 and in book form in 1881, is often seen as the watershed of Machado de Assis's work and the initial landmark of Realism in Brazil. His earlier novels, such as Resurrection, The Hand and the Glove, Helena and Iaiá Garcia, followed the romantic taste of the time, with plots of love and conflicts of feeling. From this book on comes the phase that consecrated him, with Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro, Esau and Jacob, and Counselor Ayres' Memorial.
The change lies, above all, in the narrator. Brás Cubas tells his own life after death, interrupts the story to speak to the reader, corrects earlier chapters and writes chapters of one line. Machado acknowledges his debt to the free form of Laurence Sterne and Xavier de Maistre, but in the preface to the third edition he points to what separates the book from those models: "There is in the soul of this book, however cheerful it may seem, a bitter and harsh feeling, which is far from coming from its models."
What the book has of realism is its clear-eyed view of Rio society in the nineteenth century: the interest behind the loves, the vanity that drives the political career, slavery treated with naturalness by its masters, the public opinion that matters more than conscience. None of this is told with indignation; it is shown through the voice of a man who confesses without shame because he has nothing left to lose.