Dom Casmurro

Dom Casmurro is an 1899 novel by the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and it is usually named alongside his earlier The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas as one of the masterpieces of Brazilian realist writing. It is presented as the memoir of a jealous, distrustful husband, and the narrator is not a reliable guide to what happened.

Bento Santiago, known by the nickname of the title, narrates his own youth and marriage: the childhood love for Capitu next door, the pledge that keeps him from the priesthood his mother had promised him to, the years of marriage, and the friendship with Escobar that becomes the centre of his doubt. Because the account is written by the person the doubt belongs to, the reader is left to weigh his certainty.

Machado de Assis wrote the novel late in his career, and its structure is the source of its long argument: almost everything the book asserts arrives through a character who needs it to be true. Brazilian criticism placed Dom Casmurro at the top of the national canon, and later translations into English brought the same debate to readers in another language.