Dom Casmurro

Dom Casmurro (1899), by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, is narrated by Bento Santiago in old age as he reconstructs the story of his own life. As a boy, Bento falls for Capitu, the sharp-eyed girl next door, but his mother had promised God she would give her son to the priesthood, and sends him to seminary to keep that vow. Bento and Capitu contrive to have the promise released instead, and they marry — but the happiness is short-lived.

After the sudden death of Bento's closest friend, Escobar, Bento becomes convinced, watching Capitu's grief at the funeral, that she and Escobar had been lovers, and that his own son is not his. The novel never resolves whether this is true: Bento is a famously unreliable narrator, and the evidence he presents against Capitu is filtered entirely through his own jealousy and self-justification, so the reader is left to weigh his case rather than simply accept it.

Widely regarded as Machado de Assis's greatest work and a cornerstone of Brazilian literature, Dom Casmurro is prized for its psychological ambiguity, its ironic first-person voice, and its anticipation of preoccupations later associated with modernism and psychoanalysis. Its central question — was Capitu guilty, or was her husband's mind the whole crime — has divided readers and critics for over a century.