Description

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A masterpiece of realism, Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro probes the mind of a distrustful husband with delusions of grandeur.

Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s critically acclaimed translations of Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis introduced a new generation of readers to one of Brazil’s most groundbreaking authors. Hailed as “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” (Susan Sontag), Machado’s genius is on full display in this fresh translation of the 1899 classic Dom Casmurro. In his supposed memoir, Bento Santiago, an engaging yet unreliable narrator, suspects his wife, Capitu, of having an affair with his closest friend. Withdrawn and obsessive, our antihero mines the origins of their love story: from childhood neighbors playing innocently in the backyard to his brief spell in a seminary to marriage and the birth of their child—whom, he fears, does not resemble him. A gripping domestic drama brimming with Machado’s signature humor, this is another stunningly modern tale from the progenitor of twentieth-century fiction.

About the Author

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Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was born in Rio de Janeiro and, along with seven short-story collections, wrote such groundbreaking novels as Quincas Borba and The Alienist.

For her translations of Spanish and Portuguese, Margaret Jull Costa has won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize four times as well as the Premio Valle-Inclán, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the 2008 PEN Prize for best translation from any language for The Maias, by Eça de Queirós (New Directions, 2007).

Award-winning translator Robin Patterson lives in England.

Praise For…

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A beguilingly slippery tale by Brazil’s greatest proto-modernist writer . . . In this readable translation . . . Machado proves himself a gifted portraitist of flawed human characters who harbor psychological depths.
— Kirkus Reviews