DOM Casmurro

By Machado de Assis

Book Overview

"A palm tree, seeing me troubled and divining the cause, murmured in its branches that there was nothing wrong with fifteen-year old boys getting into corners with girls of fourteen; quite the contrary, youths of that age have no other function, and corners were made for that very purpose. It was an old palm-tree, and I believed in old palm-trees even more than in old books. Birds, butterflies, a cricket trying out its summer song, all the living things of the air were of the same opinion." So begins this extraordinary love story between Bento and Capitu, childhood sweethearts who grow up next door to each other in Rio de Janeiro in the 1850s.
Like other great nineteenth century novels--The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary--Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro explores the themes of marriage and adultery. But what distinguishes Machado's novel from the realism of its contemporaries, and what makes it such a delightful discovery for English-speaking readers, is its eccentric and wildly unpredictable narrative style. Far from creating the illusion of an orderly fictional "reality," Dom Casmurro is told by a narrator who is disruptively self-conscious, deeply subjective, and prone to all manner of marvelous digression. As he recounts the events of his life from the vantage of a lonely old age, Bento continually interrupts his story to reflect on the writing of it: he examines the aptness of an image or analogy, considers cutting out certain scenes before taking the manuscript to the printer, and engages in a running, and often hilarious, dialogue with the reader. "If all this seems a little emphatic, irritating reader," he says, "it's because you have never combed a girl's hair, you've never put your adolescent hands on the young head of a nymph..." But the novel is more than a performance of stylistic acrobatics. It is an ironic critique of Catholicism, in which God appears as a kind of divine accountant whose ledgers may be balanced in devious as well as pious ways. It is also a story about love and its obstacles, about deception and self-deception, and about the failure of memory to make life's beginning fit neatly into its end. First published in 1900, Dom Casmurro is one of the great unrecognized classics of the turn of the century by one of Brazil's greatest writers. The popularity of Machado de Assis in Latin America has never been in doubt and now, with the acclaim of such critics and writers as Susan Sontag, John Barth, and Tony Tanner, his work is finally receiving the worldwide attention it deserves.
Newly translated and edited by John Gledson, with an afterword by Joao Adolfo Hansen, this Library of Latin America edition is the only complete, unabridged, and annotated translation of the novel available. It offers English-speaking readers a literary genius of the rarest kind.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195103092
• ISBN13: 9780195103090
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Othello?

When a novelist writes from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, it at least creates the illusion that we're hearing a full and fair version of events. But it is a peculiarity of first person narrative that some of the very best and some of the very worst novels which use the technique leave us wondering what the story might sound like from the perspective of a different character. We all assume that Sam Spade and...

Jealousy or "just Bento out of shape"

European students of literature usually concentrate on writers from their own continent, with occasional nods across the Atlantic to North America. Americans have a somewhat more respectful attitude to Europe, but that's all. Neither take the rest of the world all that seriously and that's a big mistake. Among the national literatures most consistently ignored, none has more to offer than Brazil's. Four writers stand out...

A Masterpiece of World Literature

Machado de Assis is probably one of the most underrated authors literature departments around the US-and other countries-have (not) encountered. He is an absolute requirement for anyone who wishes to consider him/herself well-read. Called "Othello of the Southern Cross" by Helen Caldwell (who wrote the excellent The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis-A Study of Dom Casmurro, Berkeley:University of California Press,...

a major masterpiece, a classic

If you think of it, for the first three quarters of this superb novel nothing happens. In fact the one thing that could happen, doesn't. Yet paced with the sure cadence of a machine gun, short chapter after perfectly sized short chapter, a tension is built up that turns this reconstruction of the narrator's thoughts and feelings of long ago into a page turner. Even descriptions are refracted through the narrator's thoughts...

A lifelong favorite

When I first read this book, back in 1987, I was about to marry the girl who had lived next door ever since I was 10. I instantly knew the book would be a lifelong favorite because of the wonderful, simple, and short descriptions of childhood love in one of the early chapters. The question of unfaithfulness Machado created in my mind was only a scholarly one, it did not touch me as emotionally as the passages of childhood...