My Reading Life

Finished July 2026

1. Why I picked it up — and where I read it

For a few years now I’ve been building an around-the-world collection: books from as many countries as I can get to. It started when I looked at my shelves and realized that almost everything I had ever read was English or Anglo-Indian or American. Wonderful books, most of them — but a very narrow window onto a very large world. I wanted a bigger view.

So on a recent trip to Rio, I packed my two Brazilian books and finished them on the beach. I am going to be insufferable about this for a while. Reading Dom Casmurro on a Brazilian beach, a short walk from the very neighborhoods the book is set in! How cool is that?

I chose this one because of its stature — it is the Brazilian classic, the novel everyone there seems to have an opinion about. And I liked it a great deal. It kept me hooked the whole way through.

2. A narrator who will not leave you alone

The first thing that struck me is the style. Machado’s narrator talks to you. Constantly. He addresses you as “friend reader,” “my devout lady reader,” “grave man.” He apologizes for digressions and then digresses anyway. He tells you he is going to skip something and then tells you what it was. Much of the humor arrives through this side door — not in the events, but in the narrator’s running commentary on the events and on his own storytelling.

It is remarkable and, more to the point, enormously enjoyable. I have read plenty of first-person novels; I have not often read one where the narrator felt this much like a person leaning across the table at me.

3. Tiny chapters — and a writer running out of paper

The book is built out of 148 very short chapters, some of them barely a paragraph. A chapter will stop the narrative dead to muse on a coconut palm, or a beggar, or the bookworms eating an old volume, and then move on as if nothing happened. Each one has a title. It is a lovely, unhurried way to read.

And then — my favorite structural joke in the whole novel — well past the two-thirds mark, the narrator is still only seventeen years old. In Chapter 97, having just gotten himself out of the seminary at seventeen, he stops and confesses: this should have been the middle of the book, but inexperience let him follow his pen, and now he is nearly at the end of his paper with the best of the story still untold. From here on, he says, it will have to be great strides, chapter piled on chapter, little revision, little reflection, everything in summary. One page will be worth months; others will be worth years.

And then he does it. The next chapter covers five years in a sentence.

We all know this is constructed. Machado knew exactly how many pages he had. But the feeling of a book written without much planning or revision — of a man who has simply started talking and has to catch himself — adds enormously to the pleasure of reading it. It also does something sneakier, which only occurred to me later: it hands you a narrator who has just told you, in his own words, that he is unreliable about proportion. Remember that.

The one place the book made me work is in these reflective passages. Some of them are genuinely dense, and I had to read them two or three times — and once or twice the idea still slipped away from me. I don’t hold it against the book. But it is not all breeze.

4. The gist

The story is set in Rio de Janeiro during the long reign of Pedro II — what gets called Brazil’s Second Empire. The action opens on a November afternoon in 1857 and runs into the early 1870s, but it is being written down decades later by an aging, solitary man in a suburban house well outside the old city, whose neighbors have nicknamed him Dom Casmurro. He is Bento Santiago — Bentinho — fifteen years old when the book begins, the only son of a wealthy widow who, before he was born, vowed to give him to the Church if God would let this one live. That promise hangs over the entire first half. Next door lives Capitu, fourteen and considerably sharper than he is, and the two of them are in love before either quite has a word for it. At the seminary he acquires his closest friend, Escobar. He gets out of the priesthood, reads law, marries Capitu, has a son — and then spends the rest of his life deciding what all of it meant.

5. The people in the house

Some of the secondary characters made a much stronger impression on me than I expected.

José Dias is the great comic creation. He is the household’s agregado — the dependent, the hanger-on — who talked his way in years ago as a homeopathic doctor, later admitted he was no doctor at all, and was kept on anyway because he had made himself indispensable. He speaks entirely in superlatives (“a bitter duty — a most bitterest duty!”), flatters everyone, and manages, by sheer persistence and charm, to have real influence in a house where he owns nothing. It is very funny and also a little chilling, once you see how much skill is required to survive that way.

Machado gives José Dias a whole early chapter titled simply “The Dependent,” and then deploys the term with wonderful precision — not as a neutral label but as a small blade, produced at exactly the moments when somebody is remembering where he stands. The sharpest instance is Bentinho himself, fifteen years old, rehearsing how he will ask José Dias for a favor and steadying his nerve with the thought: the house is mine, he is a mere dependent. The boy has never done anything for anyone, and he already knows how to use that.

Cousin Justina is a smaller pleasure but a perfect one. One moment I know I will remember is the evening Escobar first comes to dinner, and everyone is charmed, and even Justina — who is made of vinegar and never approves of anybody — allows that he is a very estimable young man, in spite of. José Dias, seeing that she has not finished the sentence, asks: in spite of what? She has no answer, and could not have one. The narrator explains that the “in spite of” was a sort of reservation held in advance, against some fault she might one day discover in him. Ha ha! I have met that woman.

Dona Glória is the one I wish we had gotten more of. She is introduced as still young and still beautiful at forty-two, stubbornly hiding it under a black dress and a black shawl and an old tortoiseshell comb, as if being a widow required it. That is a fascinating woman. But we only ever see her through her son’s eyes, and he has decided in advance what she is: the chapter that reports her death is titled, flatly, “A Saint.” Sainthood is a lid. Once he puts it on her, the nuances stop.

6. The love story

The teenage romance is genuinely touching — the names scratched into the wall between the two yards, the interrupted hair-combing, the wonderful business of two children who have already promised themselves to each other and cannot say a word out loud. And the married love is touching too, which is rarer in novels.

There is one scene I keep returning to. Capitu throws her arms around his shoulders, and he does the same, and Bento says he felt the lack of a sculptor there to transfer the pose into a piece of marble. He knows only the artist would get the credit; he says he doesn’t care, because they would know it was them. So, delicious! That is a happy man.

And then — this is Machado all over — the very next breath is Bento admitting that no, of course the jealousy never stopped, not for the child and not for the years; that the smallest gesture tormented him, the least word, and often enough her mere indifference would do it. The marble and the poison in consecutive paragraphs.

7. So did she, or didn’t she?

I am still turning this over, which I take to be precisely what Machado wanted. But it is worth being honest about how the book distributes its weight, because it does not distribute it evenly.

Almost everything in the novel points in one direction, and that direction is Bentinho. He has jealous fits over nothing from adolescence onward — over a boy who glances at Capitu in the street, over a dance partner, over a neighbour, at one point over the sea for holding her attention. This happens again and again, for hundreds of pages, long before there is a marriage to be unfaithful to. He never extracts a confession from her; the closest he gets is the instant in front of Escobar’s photograph, where he announces that her confusion became pure confession — which is not a confession at all, it could very well be a jealous man’s reading of a face. Her tears at Escobar’s funeral could be exactly what they appear to be, grief for a dear friend, observed by a husband who has already made up his mind. And two sentences before the photograph, Bento tells us himself that he had been on the point of concluding the whole thing was a hallucination.

Even the resemblance — the only physical evidence anyone in the book ever produces — arrives pre-demolished. Ezequiel is a compulsive mimic. He does Cousin Justina, he does José Dias, he does his grandmother so well that she kisses him for it. And when Bento first notices Escobar in the boy, what he notices is a mannerism — a way of planting the feet, a way of using the eyes — recorded quite calmly as one more item in the same repertoire. Only later does that observation get promoted from mimicry to anatomy. He even offers the mimicry explanation out loud to Sancha, before the suspicion has hardened; Escobar adds that children constantly in one another’s company often start to look alike; and Capitu says the boy takes after her own father. The case against the case is all there, in the accuser’s own writing.

What lifts the book above a straightforward study of jealousy, though, is what happens when something arrives that ought to stop him. It doesn’t stop him. It gets absorbed. Take the night he goes to the theatre and sees Othello — for the first time, he tells us; he had never read it either, and knew only the subject. So he sits there and watches Iago drip his slander into a man’s ear, and watches that man murder an innocent wife to the frenzied applause of the house. The play is a warning addressed to him personally, delivered at volume, with a demonstration attached. And by the last act, he says, he had grasped its lesson: that it was not he who ought to die, but Capitu.

Walking home, he goes further. And she was innocent, he thinks — what would the audience have done if she had really been guilty, as guilty as Capitu? What death would the Moor have given her then? A pillow would not have done. It would have taken blood and fire, a fire vast and intense enough to consume her entirely and reduce her to dust, and the dust thrown to the wind, eternal extinction. He has just watched the definitive drama of jealousy with nothing behind it, and he comes away thinking that the sentence should be much harsher for the truly guilty. Not for one second does he wonder whether he is the Moor.

The same thing happens with the portrait. Early on, in a chapter actually titled “The Portrait,” Sancha’s father points to a picture of his dead wife and asks Bento whether Capitu isn’t the image of her — the same forehead, the same eyes, the same temperament, the two of them like sisters, and no blood relation between them of any kind. In life, the old man says, there are strange resemblances like this. That line sits on the table, loaded, for sixty chapters. And Bento does eventually pick it up: at the very end, in the moments before he settles on the separation, he tells us he had been recalling exactly those words, and instructs the reader to go back and find the chapter, since he can no longer remember its number. He retrieves the exculpatory evidence in his own book, holds it up, looks straight at it — and sends his wife and son to Switzerland anyway.

Which leaves one thing. Everything above happens inside Bentinho’s head, or is dismantled by it. There is exactly one incident in the novel that seems to come from outside — that he reports without appearing to grasp, and that does not need his interpretation to be strange. Capitu is unwell and stays home from an opera premiere, insisting he go without her. Bento leaves, gets worried, comes back at the end of the first act — and finds Escobar at the door of his corridor. Escobar says he came about an important legal matter, some third-party embargoes; an incident had come up, he had dined in town and didn’t want to go home without mentioning it. But the business is trivial. It is nothing. Bento, who is a lawyer, records the excuse and lets it go.

That reads to me like an event that actually happened — and that Bentinho never once retrieves later, when he is combing his life for evidence. He has the receipt in his own manuscript and doesn’t look at it. I suspect the author did that deliberately.

So I remain suspended, which I think is exactly where Machado wants me. And what keeps coming back to me is the other reading, the sadder one: what a colossal tragedy if she was innocent. A happy marriage. A bright, devoted son. All of it burned down by one man’s obsession, and the wife and child shipped off to Europe to be quietly disposed of — and the man himself left alone in a replica of his childhood house, decades later, still trying to tie the two ends of his life together and failing.

In sum

Superb narration, superb storytelling, superb writing. The construction is doing so much more than it appears to be doing, and it took me a while after finishing to see how much. I understand now why Machado de Assis is held where he is held — and I am glad the around-the-world project delivered me to him.