Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Not your Grandma’s Brazil. Your Great-Great-Grandma’s, Maybe.

Dom Casmurro by Machado De Assis

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According to the blurb on the back of this Penguin paperback, de Assis was Brazil’s greatest novelist.  (To give you an idea of the timeline here, this was one of his last novels, and was written in 1899.)  Never heard of the guy.  To be fair, though, most of my background in Latin American authors was triggered by my high school Spanish classes, which would exclude this author.  The world of Portuguese language literature is far smaller than that of Spanish language literature.  Anyway! Dom […]

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Machado de Assis (1881)

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis

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CBR13Bingo – Pandemic We learn in the opening section and introduction to this book that Machado de Assis has Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in mind with this book, and that influence is clear throughout. The structure of this novel is not entirely novelistic, but instead is presented as a diary published after the death of our protagonist, Bras Cubas, who is a minor, failing lord who owns plantations in Brazil. And sometimes a lot happens and sometimes very little happens, as is the nature of […]

A delightfully modern 19th century novel

Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

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CBR12 BINGO: Green BINGO (diagonal): Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Violet Note: I read the version translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, published in 2020.  When you open a book and find that it is dedicated to “the first worm to gnaw the cold flesh of my corpse,” you know it isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill novel. I might not find that so unusual (I do enjoy my share of darkly humorous authors), though, if this novel hadn’t been originally published in 1881. […]



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