Word: casmurro
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...affectionately remembered by Brazil's extraordinary novelist, Machado de Assis, who died in 1908. A popular author during his lifetime, Machado was rediscovered in Brazil at the time of the centenary of his birth (1939). Since then, translations of his works (Epitaph of a Small Winner, Dom Casmurro) have begun to trickle into the U.S. market...
...lifetime (1839-1908) as Brazil's greatest man of letters, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis would doubtless have relished the irony of this posthumous foreign recognition for a novel whose hero is a garrulous ghost, bent on describing his own small genius for failure while alive. Dom Casmurro is a more poignant and more muted Epitaph of a Small Winner, but anyone with a slight case of TV-jeebies can find a good evening's entertainment...
...Casmurro is the narrator-hero's nickname, and it translates, roughly, as Lord Sourpuss. The story he has to tell is a kind of epitaph of a big loser, a man who, through his wife's infidelity, loses her, his best friend...
...Casmurro's real name is Bento, and he does not start out a sourpuss. At the age of 15, Bento's head is full of great but nebulous expectations: "After Napoleon, lieutenant and emperor, all destinies are possible in this century." His heart throbs for Capitu, a dark-haired Juliet with "eyes like the tide when the undertow is strong." Bento's mother had dedicated him to the church at birth, but the seminary is not for Bento. He wins his release along with a seminarist friend named Ezekiel, and goes off to law school. Then...
Author Machado has his hero flirt with suicide and murder before he turns him into a philosophical autobiographer. What keeps Dom Casmurro from being a routine triangle drama is the wit and wisdom with which Author Machado embroiders his plot. As in Epitaph of a Small Winner, he breaks into his story with joshing asides to the reader, e.g., "Perhaps I'll scratch this out when it goes to press," "Shake your head, reader. Make all the gestures of incredulity there are." His piece of advice hardest to follow: "Throw away this book...