Dom Casmurro

Amazon.com Review
The unreliable narrator and the fictional memoir are long-standing literary traditions.

Nineteenth-century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis uses both to brilliant effect in his novel Dom Casmurro.

Narrated by Bento Santiago, this memoir looks back over a life filled with the suspicion of betrayal: Bento is convinced that his wife had an affair with his best friend, and that his son was the result of it.

Though he has no real evidence to support this belief, Bento becomes so obsessed with it that, in the end, he commits crimes far worse than the suspected adultery to avenge himself.

The memoir itself is a kind of justification for his actions; Bento, now alone, recreates the environment of his childhood and attempts to rewrite the facts of his life--in essence, reconstructing the past.
Among readers familiar with Latin American literature, Machado is considered a master.

His novels blend black comedy with deadly accurate social commentary and an unerring perception of human psychology to create works that are brilliant, complex without being opaque, and joys to read.

The Oxford University Press edition is ably translated by John Gledson and accompanied by critical essays that will help orient readers unfamiliar with Machado's work.

From Publishers Weekly
It's the simplest of stories: boy falls in love with girl next door, they grow up, marry and have a child.

Enter jealousy, exit happiness and boy/narrator, Betinho, who goes on to write his magnum opus, the History of the Suburbs .

However, Betinho has been promised since conception to the priesthood, a glitch that allows de Assis to describe a community so familiar with God that bargaining with Him is as common as haggling with the butcher.

This upper- middle-class Brazilian society of the last century ( Dom Casmurro was first published in 1899) is the setting for Betinho's transformation from a coddled only child to the middle-aged Dom Casmurro, or Lord Taciturn.

It is marked by his fantastic imagination, both comic (as when he consults with maggots who are eating books he needs for a dissertation) and tragic (evidence of his beloved wife's infidelity is circumstantial at best).

Deftly translated, Dom Casmurro is a book full of humor, sweetness and a tender melancholy--a book that deserves to be read.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dom Casmurro é um romance escrito por Machado de Assis em 1899 e publicado pela Livraria Garnier.

Foi escrito para sair diretamente em livro, o que ocorreu em 1900, embora com data do ano anterior.

Completa a "trilogia realista" de Machado de Assis, ao lado de Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas e Quincas Borba, tendo sido esses dois escritos primeiramente em folhetins.

Seu personagem principal é Bento Santiago, o narrador da história que, contada em primeira pessoa, pretende "atar as duas pontas da vida", ou seja, unir relatos desde sua mocidade até os dias em que está escrevendo o livro.

Entre esses dois momentos Bento escreve sobre suas reminiscências da juventude, sua vida no seminário, seu caso com Capitu e o ciúme que advém desse relacionamento, que se torna o enredo central da trama.

Ambientado no Rio de Janeiro do Segundo Império, se inicia com um episódio que seria recente em que o narrador recebe a alcunha de "Dom Casmurro", daí o título do romance.

Machado de Assis o escreveu utilizando ferramentas literárias como a ironia e uma intertextualidade que alcança Schopenhauer e sobretudo a peça Otelo de Shakespeare.

Ao longo dos anos, Dom Casmurro, com seus temas como o ciúme, a ambiguidade de Capitu, o retrato moral da época e o caráter do narrador, recebeu inúmeros estudos, adaptações para outras mídias e sofreu inúmeras interpretações, desde psicológicas e psicanalíticas na crítica literária dos anos 30 e dos anos 40, passando pelo feminismo na década de 1970 até sociológicas da