DOM CASMURRO

A beguilingly slippery tale by Brazil’s greatest proto-modernist writer.

Bento Santiago is known to his friends as Bentinho. But, at the beginning of Machado de Assis’ 1899 novel, he has earned the sobriquet Dom Casmurro, meaning something like “Sir Stubbornly Self-Absorbed,” for falling asleep when a budding poet assailed him with verse on a train ride. Bentinho, whom we meet as an aging, moderately prosperous attorney, is part of a minor noble rural family that moved to Rio de Janeiro and settled in a well-to-do neighborhood (Machado makes much, subtly, of Rio’s rich-and-poor geography). There, at 15, he falls in love with 14-year-old neighbor Capitu. Tensions face him as his now-widowed mother wheedles him to honor a pledge she’s made to God that her firstborn son will become a priest, while Capitu tries to dissuade him. Bentinho enters the seminary all the same and befriends Escobar, a young man who wants to be a merchant, not a priest. Both break free, and Bentinho and Capitu marry. But why does their son, a gifted mimic, do one impersonation better than all others? As Bentinho says, after all, “There’s even something about the way he walks, about his eyes, that reminds me of Escobar....” Bentinho has always been jealous over the beautiful Capitu—in a meaningful scene, she exchanges woo-pitching glances with a rider passing by her window—but even as Capitu protests that Bentinho is his son’s real father, he embodies the meaning of his nickname. The trick of this short novel is that the reader must decide whom to believe, for much suggests that Bentinho is not a trustworthy narrator, while Capitu is alternately characterized as both sly and faithful. Whatever the case, in this readable translation (the use of a few creaky expressions such as flibbertigibbet notwithstanding), Machado proves himself a gifted portraitist of flawed human characters who harbor psychological depths.

A fine if elusive find for aficionados of world literature.