The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is the novel in which Brás Cubas, already dead, tells his own life, from his birth in Rio de Janeiro in 1805 to his death in 1869, and ends by taking stock of what he did not achieve or have.
The book opens at the end. Brás died on a Friday in August 1869, at sixty-four, unmarried, and eleven friends carried him to the cemetery. He says an idea killed him: an anti-hypochondriac plaster, which would ease the melancholy of humanity and put his name in print everywhere. Ill, he receives a visit from Virgília, the woman he loved, and has a delirium in which Nature denies him more years of life.
Then the narrative goes back to the cradle. The son of a father who invented a noble origin for the surname, Brás is a spoiled boy who rides the servant boy Prudêncio as if he were a horse. At seventeen he spends on the Spanish woman Marcela the money he takes from his father and mother, and his father sends him to Europe, where he takes his degree at Coimbra. Back home, he sees his mother die, kisses and leaves Eugênia, the lame girl he meets in Tijuca, and receives from his father two projects: a fiancée, Virgília, and a candidacy for deputy. Lobo Neves takes both from him.
Years later, Virgília reappears married to Lobo Neves, and Brás begins to meet her in a little house in Gamboa kept by Dona Plácida. In this period he meets again his schoolmate Quincas Borba, who goes from beggar to the philosopher of Humanitism. The affair ends when Lobo Neves is appointed provincial president and the couple sails. Brás, now a deputy, begins to want to be minister; the ministry does not come, he loses his seat, and he founds an opposition newspaper that dies within months. In the last chapter he adds up the ambitions that were not fulfilled and finds a single balance: not having had children.