Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis (1881)

The author is dead, and that is the joke and the liberty of it. Brás Cubas dedicates his memoir to the first worm that gnawed his corpse, then tells the story of his life with the careless candour only a man past all consequence can afford. He pursues a married woman, drifts through an inheritance he did nothing to deserve, dreams up a miracle cure that will finally make his name, and confesses every petty vanity because the grave has made honesty cost him nothing. The chapters are tiny, some a single line, one made of nothing but punctuation, and the narrator keeps breaking off to needle you, the reader he can no longer be bothered to impress. Under all the wit, what aches is the sum it reaches: a charmed, squandered life, seen whole at last by the only man who can no longer fix it. Machado de Assis wrote the funniest book ever made from a wasted life, and somehow the saddest.