There’s something suitable, in this year gone awry, that the best novel I have read in 2020 purports to be an autobiography written from beyond the grave (“I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author”) and that it was first published in 1881 (after appearing in installments in the Revista Brazileira). With 2020 being 2020, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas) has been rendered from Portuguese into English not once, but twice, even if it has been read by me not twice, but once.1 The New Criterion arranged for me to be sent a copy of the Penguin Classics version, which has been translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and boasts a perceptive foreword by Dave Eggers. That this is a paperback, and a rival (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson) was only available in hardback was, I am sure, merely a coincidence.

In addition to her translation, Thomson-DeVeaux provides detailed and highly informative endnotes, an attempt, she writes, to restore “the book’s malevolent grace and depth . . . in its fullness,” not least the “jokes half-buried in the sands of time.” And she takes pains to stress that she has used endnotes, not footnotes:

Because the Posthumous Memoirs—as befits the creation of an ex-typographer—is exquisitely aware of its existence as a book, commenting on bindings, capitalization and so on, and nowhere does Brás indicate that his