In the Library
Dom Casmurro
Machado de Assis, 1899
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 148
- Length
- Length 65k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Eyes like the tide? Yes, like the tide. That's what they were.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Machado de Assis does the same wry, confessional narration here, but hands the job to a narrator who is already dead and has nothing left to lose.
£1.99
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford does the same thing with a genteel, retrospective narrator picking through a ruined marriage, but leaves you even less sure who actually betrayed whom.
£1.99
Effi Briest
Theodor Fontane
Fontane does the same slow unraveling of a marriage under the weight of suspected infidelity, but tells the story from the accused wife's own side.
£1.99
About the book
A stranger on a train once mocked Bento Santiago's gloomy silence with a nickname, Dom Casmurro, sullen gentleman, and he liked it enough to make it the title of his own defense, written by the only witness left alive. He opens with his oldest memory, Capitu, the girl next door with eyes like an undertow, eyes that pull whoever looks at them under and do not let go. Machado de Assis builds an entire marriage, an entire ruin, out of the way she watched a dead man's face at his own wake, then hands you every fact through the eyes of a husband convinced his son's face is turning, year by year, into his best friend's, with no second version to check it against. That is the wound this novel opens and refuses to close: not adultery proven, but the terrible machinery of a mind that needs it true and quietly builds the evidence to match. You will read it certain, and then, walking away, feel less certain than you have been about anything in a long time.