Word: braz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Human Editions. The hero of Epitaph is a ghost named Braz Cubas, and the book is written in the form of his memoirs. He begins, as a ghost should, with his own funeral. Only eleven people show up, but he receives a handsome eulogy. Braz observes to himself that the government bonds he willed the speaker have undoubtedly oiled his tongue. How truly famous he might have been, he reflects, if he had ever completed his great cure-all-the Braz Cubas "anti-melancholy" plaster-to relieve the despondency of mankind...
...Braz plays back the record of his life, it becomes a melody of might-have-beens. Wellborn and well-to-do, he is fleeced at 17 by a well-built gold digger: "Marcella loved me for 15 months and eleven contos ($5,500); nothing less." Nonetheless, he graduates from college "with complete faith in dark eyes and written constitutions." He becomes engaged to Virgilia, a girl with a "mouth fresh as dawn and insatiable as death," but she jilts him for a politician. He survives the experience, and uses it to sharpen the Braz Cubas philosophy of life, also known...
...Ghost's Summary. In some of Braz's editions he is successively 1) a bachelor recluse, 2) Virgilia's lover, 3) a national deputy who loses his seat with a speech advocating smaller caps for the National Guard, and 4) editor of a newspaper that lasts only six months...
...Braz rambles a good bit. He often seems more interested in chewing his philosophical cud than in telling his story. He will drop everything else for an epigram. Samples: "We kill time; time buries us." "One endures with patience the pain in the other fellow's stomach." From his ghost world, he sums up his life on earth as a zero. He has one" satisfaction: "I had no progeny, I transmitted to no one the legacy of our misery." That, Braz figures, makes him a "small winner...