Review of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' "Dom Casmurro"

“Dom Casmurro” is one of those books that, if you had the good fortune of given a solid Brazilian education in the humanities, you would be quite familiar with. In fact, de Assis is still regularly assigned in literature classes there, and is regarded as one of the greatest writers working in the Portuguese language in the nineteenth century. It’s one of those serendipities of history that we Anglophones don’t know him better; as many commentaries on the novel all too enthusiastically point out, he displays some unusual parallels to writers whose names are more familiar to our ears, namely Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola. 

On the surface, it’s a simple enough love story between Bento, a young boy whose mother has ambitions of him becoming a seminarian and his beloved Capitu. Bento actually goes to the seminary for a short time and meets and befriends a fellow seminarian named Escobar. There is a possibility that Escobar also loves Capitu, but de Assis leaves this wonderfully ambiguous. Flaubert, however, never played with the unreliable narrator to the extent that de Assis does in this novel. Because of the open ambiguity of Escobar’s feelings, Bento and his ravenous jealousy are left to narrate the novel as they will – and it does seem that his jealousy becomes a character all its own. It shapes the entire world of Escobar’s intentions, all the while never leaving Capitu the time to shape her own or explain her actions. Does Bento have reason to feel this jealousy, or is it all just a figment of his own imagination? 

These questions, which would otherwise form a good denouement for the action, are never resolved. You’re left in the position that Bento is, examining the minute details of his relationship for signs of Capitu’s infidelity. It’s difficult to tell whether someone like Ford Madox Ford knew of de Assis’ work , but if he did I wouldn’t be the least surprised. The similarities with “The Good Soldier” (which postdates this novel by fifteen years) are uncanny: the use of the unreliable narrator in the examination of a love triangle (or is it even a triangle at all?) is extraordinarily riveting and effective. For those weaned on the European canon and interested in branching out and finding new writers whose names might not be as well-recognized in the English-speaking world, you could do a lot worse than Machado de Assis.