Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

While I confess to being almost totally ignorant of literature written in Portuguese, despite taking some pride in being fairly widely-read, I can at least place a large portion on the blame on the Western canon, and take a modicum of vindication from the fact that I’ve now read one of Brazil’s most famous books, Dom Casmurro, and placed it very high on my list of favourite ever novels. It’s most certainly in my top ten, somewhere.

What is most incredible about Machado de Assis’s charming little story is that it was first published in 1899, but – only in very small part thanks to a sprightly translation – reads like the most modern of novels. I don’t just mean it has a colloquial style; its short chapters, flawed and fascinating narrator and constant playful digressions are a long way ahead of their time. This book needs to find its way into global consciousness, because it deserves it.

The story is simple, indeed, plays off certain genre expectations and predictable developments in a very postmodern way. A boy called Bento is destined to be a priest, but a childhood sweetheart gets in the way, and the two young lovebirds, along with one of Bento’s friends from the Seminary, form various plans to release Bentinho from an ecclesiastical life. Finally he is released and marries the girl, Capitu, and they grow up and raise a family. All is well until Bento begins to notice that his son looks less like him and rather more like his best friend…

Machado de Assis is a supremely competent writer, his references to Shakespeare and Tacitus showing his learning while his willingness to mock his own poetic ideas keep him grounded and entirely unpretentious. He follows the slightest tangents and purposefully makes Bento scatterbrained, telling readers that the current chapter really should have been before the last one, that he wrote a certain word but then crossed it out, that he has to pick up the pace because he’s running out of paper. Subtly, much more subtly even than in Pale Fire, we come to realise that despite Bento’s apparent self-belief, he also claims not to have the best memory, and the things he’s expecting us to believe aren’t really backed up by anything more than his personal impressions and convictions; however, since his whimsical ways are so endearing, a kind of familiarity with Bento can come into being that has its peer with very few narrators, and that makes his interactions with the son he grows to fear and despise all the more shocking.

Machado de Assis’ other books are now most definitely on my reading list.