Brás Cubas is Woody Allen's "bedside book".
The filmmaker highlights the five works that have had the greatest impact on his life; the classic of Brazilian literature by Machado de Assis is among them.
247 – In an article published in Friday's edition of the British newspaper The Guardian, filmmaker Woody Allen highlighted the five books that have had the greatest impact on his life, both as a film director and as a humor writer. Among the select list is the classic of Brazilian literature, "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas," by Machado de Assis. This work is alongside "The Catcher in the Rye," by J.D. Salinger; the humor collection "The World of S.J. Perelman"; and the biographies "Really the Blues," by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, and "Elia Kazan," by Richard Schickel.
In the section about the Brazilian book, the three-time Oscar winner writes: “I simply received it in the mail one day. Some stranger in Brazil sent it to me and wrote, 'You'll like this.' Because it's a thin book, I read it. If it were a thick book, I would have discarded it.” The director of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) recounts that he was shocked by how charming and funny the book was. “I can't believe he lived so long ago. You would have thought he wrote the book yesterday, it's so modern,” he adds, referring to the author of the work, who published it in 1881. In English, the book is translated as “Epitaph of a Small Winner.” Woody Allen states that it is a very, very original work and that it touched him, just as happened with “The Catcher in the Rye.”