Chapters I to IX: Death, plaster, and delirium
I am not, properly speaking, a dead author, but an authoring corpse, for whom the grave was another cradle
Explanation and analysis
The book opens at the end. Brás Cubas, who died on a Friday in August 1869, at the age of sixty-four, explains to the reader how he will tell his story: he does not present himself as an author who is dead, but as a dead man who writes. The swap of "author deceased" and "deceased author" is the novel's first joke and also its operating rule.
What the sentence says is that death, for Brás, does not end life, only places it elsewhere: "the grave was another cradle." The tomb becomes the starting point of the book, just as the cradle is the starting point of a life. That is why the chapter begins with the death and tells of the burial, the age, the number of friends, and the goods left behind, before any memory of childhood. Whoever narrates from there has no reputation to lose, and that is the right he claims: to say what a living man would keep silent.
The sentence can also be read as a pose. To call method what is really a taste for making an effect is a way for Brás to show himself, and the reader notices this soon: the dead man presents himself with the same vanity as the living one. It is this double reading, between the frankness of a dead man and the staging of an author, that accompanies the novel to its last chapter.
what influenced me most was the pleasure of seeing printed in the newspapers, shop windows, pamphlets, street corners [...] these three words: Emplasto Brás Cubas
Explanation and analysis
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a supremely philosophical work, of an uneven philosophy, now austere, soon playful, [...] and yet more than a pastime and less than an apostolate
Explanation and analysis
Call me Nature or Pandora; I am your mother and your enemy
Explanation and analysis
Chapters X to XVI: Childhood and Marcela
Prudêncio, a houseboy, was my horse every day
Explanation and analysis
realism came upon him, eaten by mange and worms, and out of compassion carried him off into its books
Explanation and analysis
Living is not the same as dying; so say all the jewelers of this world, people who know their grammar well.
Explanation and analysis
Chapters XVII to XXIV: Coimbra and His Mother's Death
Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven contos de réis; nothing less.
Explanation and analysis
the cancer is indifferent to the virtues of the subject; when it gnaws, it gnaws; gnawing is its trade
Explanation and analysis
Living gentlemen, there is nothing as immeasurable as the scorn of the dead.
Explanation and analysis
Chapters XXV to XXXVII: Tijuca, The Black Butterfly, and Eugênia
No; it is a thinking errata, that is what it is. Each stage of life is an edition that corrects the previous one, and will be corrected too, until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives free to the worms.
Explanation and analysis
Look how good it is to be superior to butterflies!
Explanation and analysis
Blessed are those who do not descend, for theirs is the first kiss of the young ladies.
Explanation and analysis
Chapters XXXVIII to XLIX: Virgília Lost, the Death of His Father, and the Inheritance
Virgília compared the eagle and the peacock, and chose the eagle, leaving the peacock with his astonishment, his spite, and the three or four kisses he had given her
Explanation and analysis
My father was astonished by the outcome, and it seems to me he died of nothing else
Explanation and analysis
Each man has the need and the power to contemplate his own nose, so as to see the celestial light, and such contemplation, whose effect is the subordination of the universe to a single nose, constitutes the balance of societies
Explanation and analysis
Chapters L to LXIII: Virgília Married and the "Let's Flee!"
the way to make up for a closed window is to open another, so that morality may continually air the conscience
Explanation and analysis
Virgília was the pillow of my spirit
Explanation and analysis
Don't tremble so, pale reader; relax, for I shall not stain this page with a drop of blood
Explanation and analysis
Chapters LXIV to LXXVI: The Little House, the Penis, and Dona Plácida
It was a way Prudêncio had of ridding himself of the blows he had received, [...] passing them on to another.
Explanation and analysis
the greatest flaw of this book is you, reader
Explanation and analysis
whence one could deduce that vice is often the manure of virtue
Explanation and analysis
Chapters LXXVII to LXXXVII: The Presidency and the Mountaintop
It was the case of Hamlet: to bend to fortune, or to fight it and subdue it. In other words: to embark or not to embark. This is the question
Explanation and analysis
This was, I believe, the high point of our love, the mountaintop, from which for a while we looked out [...] and above us the calm blue sky. Having rested for a while, we began to descend the slope, with our hands clasped or loose, but descending, descending...
Explanation and analysis
there was in Lobo Neves a certain fundamental dignity, a layer of rock, which resisted the traffic of men. The other layers, the upper ones, loose earth and sand, life carried away, which is a perpetual landslide
Explanation and analysis
Chapters LXXXVIII to C: Viegas, Quincas Borba and the Anonymous Letter
The truth is that he was in dialogue with the embryo; it was the old dialogue of Adam and Cain, a conversation without words between life and life, mystery and mystery.
Explanation and analysis
Virgília drew back, as if from a dead man's kiss.
Explanation and analysis
I am tempted to suppress this chapter. The slope is dangerous. But after all I am writing my own memoirs, not yours, quiet reader.
Explanation and analysis
Chapters CI to CXVI: The Wall, the Weld, and the Old Leaves
It was fear, and it was not fear; it was pity and it was not pity; it was vanity and it was not vanity; in short, it was love without love, that is, without delirium
Explanation and analysis
opinion is a good solder for domestic institutions
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I was not shaken: I took them to the cemetery, as one takes money to a bank
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Chapters CXVII to CXXXVI: Humanitism, Nhã-loló and Fifty Years
this chicken, which I have just eaten, is the result of a multitude of efforts and struggles, executed with the sole purpose of satisfying my appetite
Explanation and analysis
HERE LIES / DONA EULÁLIA DAMASCENA DE BRITO / DIED / AT NINETEEN YEARS OF AGE / PRAY FOR HER!
Explanation and analysis
what did I find at the bottom of the carriage? My fifty years
Explanation and analysis
Chapters CXXXVII to CLX: The Barretina, the Ministry, and the Negatives
Death does not grow old
Explanation and analysis
The tax on grief is like Vespasian's coin: it does not smell of its origin, and it is drawn from evil as much as from good
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there is in all of us a maniac of Athens
Explanation and analysis
I had no children, I did not pass on to any creature the legacy of our misery