Dom Casmurro is a (barely) nineteenth century novel (published in 1899) that feels like a twentieth century novel: an unreliable narrator, an ironic tone, and an ambiguous outcome. Our narrator Bentinho starts as a feckless fifteen-year-old boy in love with the girl next store, Capitu. At his birth, his mother promised God that he would become a priest, but Bento wants out of it. He eventually manages to leave the seminary, marry Capitu, and settle down in a home next door to his best friend. At the climax of the story, Bento becomes convinced that he is not his son's father, that Capitu betrayed him with his friend.
Machado de Assis is often called Brazil's greatest writer, and Dom Casmurro is his best known book. Arguments continue to rage about whether Capitu cuckolded Bento. My personal feeling is that she did not. From the very beginning of the book, Bento describes characters who clearly have ulterior motives that he fails to recognize, and just before he begins suspecting Capitu he himself experiences an attraction to his friend's wife. In other words, he's clearly a poor judge of character who only understands (or misunderstands) people's intentions in terms of his own.
Machado de Assis is often called Brazil's greatest writer, and Dom Casmurro is his best known book. Arguments continue to rage about whether Capitu cuckolded Bento. My personal feeling is that she did not. From the very beginning of the book, Bento describes characters who clearly have ulterior motives that he fails to recognize, and just before he begins suspecting Capitu he himself experiences an attraction to his friend's wife. In other words, he's clearly a poor judge of character who only understands (or misunderstands) people's intentions in terms of his own.
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