Word: epitaphed
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...EPITAPH FOR LOVE (252 pp.)-Howard Clev/es-Doubleday...
Long before he died last January, his best epitaph had been inadvertently pronounced by Novelist Arnold Bennett, who was engaged in criticizing a play Eddie had thoroughly enjoyed. "Hang Eddie Marsh," grumped Bennett. "He's a miserable fellow-he enjoys everything...
When Machado de Assis' Epitaph of a Small Winner was published in the U.S. last summer (TIME, July 31), reviewers set up a cheer over the strange new star caught in their literary telescopes. Acclaimed in his own land and 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...
...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...
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...