Extract

I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing.

A dead man writes his autobiography, beginning with his own funeral and working backward through a life of privilege, cowardice, and exquisite self-awareness, pausing whenever he pleases to address the reader, mock convention, or invent a philosophy of human misery. Machado de Assis published this novel in 1881, years before the European modernists arrived at similar formal liberties, creating a masterpiece Brazil has always known and the world has been slow to discover. The chapters are tiny, some barely a paragraph, and the tone shifts from tenderness to savage irony without warning. Beneath the wit lies a profound meditation on the small betrayals that constitute a comfortable life, narrated by a man who finally has nothing left to lose.