Dom Casmurro     by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Translated by Helen Caldwell Original title: Dom Casmurro Original language: Portuguese Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Hardcover, 160 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.91 x 8.73 x 5.69 ISBN: 0720608457 List Price: $30.95, £14.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by California UP Pub. Date: 1966 Pub. Place: USA ISBN: 0520007905 List Price: $3.95 Not available for ordering Published by Noonday Pub. Date: November 1991 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 288 pages Dimensions: 0.75 x 8.00 x 5.50 inches ISBN: 0374523037 List Price: $12.00 Not available for ordering Published by Oxford University Press Pub. Date: September 1998 Format: Paperback, 288 pages Dimensions: 0.50 x 8.00 x 5.25 inches ISBN: 0195103092 Edition: Reprint List Price: $13.95, £9.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: April 1995 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 216 pages Dimensions: 0.50 x 8.00 x 5.25 inches ISBN: 0140446125 List Price: $10.95, £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99

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Dom Casmurro vies with Epitaph of a Small Winner for the title of Machado’s most famous novel and is at the top of school and university reading lists in Brazil, though perhaps not for the right reasons. On the surface, it’s a sort of Bildungsroman, (‘novel of achieving maturity’) a personal account of the narrator’s coming of age in mid-nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro, a time when the Monarchy, the landowning élite and slavery seemed most unassailable. Bentinho (‘little Bento’), the cosseted successor to the family fortune, seems to epitomize this stifling world of privileged security, as well as its darker underbelly of vulnerabilities and suspicions.

Before his birth, Bentinho’s mother made a pact with God: if He gave her a son, she would bring him up to be a priest. Bentinho has other ideas: he’s in love with his next-door neighbour and childhood playmate Capitu Pádua. Too young to assert their own will or to elope, the two children hatch a long-term plan to secure their future happiness. They succeed, but then the adult Bento’s growing certainty that he has been the victim of an inexplicable infidelity robs them of everything they’ve fought for, including the shared joy of raising their own son together. The novel is Bento’s account of this betrayal, reconstituted out of affectionate reminiscences and bitterly ironic insinuations in the twilight solitude of his life.

What, though, if our lawyer-narrator has abused his position in order to construct an incontrovertible case for the prosecution? What if his narrative is the meticulously elaborated character assassination of an upstart wife, more intelligent than her husband, intended to rationalise his irrational insecurities and suspicions and restore some meaning to the life that he himself has wrecked? Once we accept that possibility, that we may have become the willing accomplices to some ingenious manipulation, then this wistful recollection is dramatically turned on its head. We are faced instead with the disturbing portrait of infantile paranoia, class resentments and snobbery, and projected guilt, all based on Bentinho’s preference for the world of his imagination rather than that of an unsettling reality. His own thoughts and desires are revealed to him like epiphanies: he realises he’s in love with Capitu only when he overhears an adult insinuating it; he runs next door and finds her absent-mindedly scratching his name on her garden wall, and they face each other in astonished silence, struck by a realisation that’s jumped out at them, taken them by surprise.

A character in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 — describes miracles as collisions between cosmic pool-balls, the intrusion of another universe into our own. In Dom Casmurro this idea is raised into the principle of Bento’s entire existence, except that the miracle is too great for his ego to bear. One such moment occurs when Bentinho, obsessed by Capitu, sees the body of a neglected friend, a poor young neighbour who has died of leprosy. Bentinho’s cosily amorous thoughts are annoyingly disturbed by this inconvenient reminder of a less privileged world — as he puts it, people’s individual consciousnesses are like separate galaxies, one ‘poking its nose’ into another from time to time. T M & D T

Of the furniture only the sofa seemed to have understood our situation, offering its services with such insistence that we accepted and sat down. My own particular opinion concerning sofas dates from that moment. They unite intimacy with decorum, revealing the whole house without us having to leave the drawing-room. Two men sitting on one can discuss the destiny of an empire, and two women the cut of a frock; but only by some aberration of nature will a man and a woman talk about anything other than themselves. That was what we did, Capitu and I. 129-30