Discover the riotous prose of a classic Brazilian author

HIS GRANDPARENTS were slaves. His father painted houses. His immigrant mother washed laundry. For a poor, mixed-race boy born in Brazil in 1839, their son had done well to become an apprentice typesetter in Rio de Janeiro. But a priest taught him Latin, and a literary gent spotted the gifted lad at the Imprensa Nacional, the government press, and soon he was contributing to newspapers, writing plays and poems and starting a literary circle.

But it was as a novelist that Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis would truly shine. Machado worked as a civil servant and co-founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters; he married happily (although his Portuguese in-laws initially objected to the colour of his skin). Beneath all this outward respectability, his prose was radically ingenious. Ever since “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”, Machado’s fifth novel, appeared in 1881 it has astonished readers with its lordly ironies and scorn for convention. The book’s invigorating style, as much as its backdrop of racial and social injustice, makes it ideal reading for this morbid, insurgent summer.

Brás Cubas, the fictional memoirist, has just died from pneumonia. As a thwarted corpse who failed in almost everything he tried, he wants to set the record straight about his drifting life as an idle, pleasure-seeking dandy in Rio. Beneath his...