Oxford's newly launched "Library of Latin America" wisely begins
with attractive new editions of the fiction of Brazil's greatest
novelist. Originally published in 1900, this novel is the
first-person confession of Bento Santiago, a middle-aged lawyer
whose long marriage to the woman of his dreams (the delightfully
named, and delightful, Capitu) falls to relieve his myriad
frustrations and suspicions. The self-tormenting narrator's
explosive, digressive revelations of his own vanity and
shortsightedness make for both a piquant criticism of the romantic
temperament and an unforgettably wry character study. (Kirkus
Reviews)
"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.
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