Description

Taciturn and solitary, Bento Santiago – nicknamed Dom Casmurro – lives in a perfect replica of his childhood home in Rio de Janeiro. He spends his days reading and dozing, and is planning to write a History of the Suburbs. But it wasn’t always this way – once upon a time he was a happy husband and father. In a narrative full of twists, turns, sly winks at the reader and revelations that change our understanding of what came before, he tells the story of his life so far.

Promised to the priesthood at birth, Bento realises at fifteen that he cannot fulfil his mother’s wishes: he is deeply in love with Capitu, the girl next door. Their passionate attachment sweeps opposition out of the way, and eventually they are married and, later, blessed with a son. Bento’s life is perfect – until the day he begins to suspect that Capitu has betrayed him with his best friend. Was her love a lie? Is his son really his own? And if he dismantles his entire life, will jealousy give way to regret?

For a century and a half, readers have argued over the truth at the heart of this story, and delighted in its witty ambivalence, formal inventiveness, and heartbreakingly doomed romance.

Publisher Review

The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America * Susan Sontag * If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado De Assis is the writer who made Borges possible * Salman Rushdie * Genius… Dom Casmurro has to be read more than once. It teaches us to read in much the same way that Vermeer teaches us to see – by looking, and then looking again… the longer we look, the more we grow aware of everything that we’re seeing, and everything we’re not — Benjamin Moser * New York Times * A beguilingly slippery tale by Brazil’s greatest proto-modernist writer… a gifted portraitist of flawed human characters who harbor psychological depths * Kirkus Reviews * Machado [has] enviable gifts as a writer: the apparent simplicity of language, the uncanny ear for dialogue, the generous appetite for human comedy. Characters come alive in a single stroke… One of the pleasures of reading Machado is to encounter this comedy of detail, of human particulars… There is a worldly hunger in Machado’s writing, an openness to both life and art * Los Angeles Review of Books * Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James * New York Times Book Review * Delightfully enigmatic * Booklist * Machado de Assis is a great ironist, a tragic comedian. In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh * Philip Roth * There is something irresistibly delightful about how he puts his tragic universe across . . . His ability to tickle the reader is inexhaustible * Spectator *