Machado de Assis was an unusual 19th century novelist: Brazilian but not a fabulist magic realist; realist but Sterne-like in his endless digressions. He admired Stendhal and Flaubert, but also experimented with narrative technique. De Assis was a subversive and a skeptic, and his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro, critiques the Catholic church's doctrine of celibacy. Marriage and infidelity, sex and religion are at the heart of this fin de siecle novel, which commits to no totalizing system of belief.
Dom Casmurro anticipates postmodern metafiction in that the narrator Bento often comments upon narrative form, the actual process of composition. Its modernity is marked by its skepticism, relativistic values, and blackly comic, grotesque juxtapositions, and Bentinho's sense that "I myself am missing, and that lacuna is all-important" point to the fragmentation of the unitary self; loss of memory itself defines Bento's character and his actions.
Elsewhere, Bentinho explicates an unwritten sonnet of his and writes of "books with omissions," prefiguring Jorge Luis Borges' "ficciones" (see, for example, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote"). Formally, the economy and discontinuity of the chapters mimic the innovations of the next century. Yet for all its "shocks of the modern," the voice of Dom Casmurro is ironic, detached, whimsical, and complex--a novel that will delight the reader.
