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A review by korrick
Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis
3.0
3.5/5
Whatever the case, unlike EoaSW, this did not prove a favorite. To be fair, I would likely have had to dedicate myself to fin de siècle and older literature for some time before picking this up to appreciate it, as much of the turns and tricks it espouses have become borderline conventional today unless your world is composed solely of Tristram Shandy and epistolary novels, of course). As such, I did not, and despite doing my best to put myself in the mindset of past me encountering de Assis' earlier work, the first of this purported trilogy which DC is the last, I still found myself less than titillated. This can be conjectured from the fact that all the quotes I found worthwhile are nearly pure authorial digression and have little or nothing to do with the text that supposedly birthed them. Admittedly, there's a particular chunk of text that is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I've ever come across, but as it is another nearly stand alone thought exercise rather than an integral part of gunpowder, treason and plot, I feel comfortable treating with it separately.
Somewhere down the line I heard that DC is a text taught in Brazilian schools of the pre-collegiate levels. I haven't bothered to fact check this, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, as for all of de Assis' eccentricities, he does in fact deliver a cohesive plot that, as it occurs for the most part in the mind and heart of an imagined fifteen year old boy, would have a strong appeal to that portion of the classroom which usually dominates the discourse. However, despite how much of a theoretical benefit of a doubt the afterword's author insists on giving de Assis', the thematic focus is, stripped of its fripperies, a mere repetition of toxic masculine mundanities, and all the tension promised in the beginning by a sensitive and inquisitive young boy peters out in the solidness of paranoia, possessiveness, and funerals overseas. I could bend over backwards and into that untrustworthy narrator guise, but it'd still be less interesting than the dead nobleman in this work's predecessor.
I'm going to leave off on a positive note, cause seriously, how many black writers writing in translation in the 19th century do you know off the top of your head? Alexandre Dumas is one, Alexander Pushkin another to a degree (what is with all these Alexanders I wonder), and I'm going to have to keep digging from here on out. The foreword even states that de Assis took especial pride in his black ancestry during a time when antiblack slavery still existed in his homeland, which is just fucking fabulous. There's also that God and Satan opera business I referred to, which if I was less tired and more careless about copyrights and such I'd type out right here, but seeing as both characteristics are holding in place, I'll simply let interested parties know that the sequence may be found on the eighteenth through the twentieth pages of this particular edition. Apparently this is an unabridged type, so be careful that your chosen copy hasn't chopped out a redeeming feature or two.
There might be some exaggeration in this; but that's the way with human discourse, a mixture of the overblown and the undersized, which make up for each other, and in the end level out.It's fitting that a review of a book whose overarching theme is of fickle memory must also do battle with that particularly slippery titan of an abstract concept. On the one hand, who knows how long it would have taken me to come across this work had the splendorifous skull of [b:Epitaph of a Small Winner|909746|Epitaph of a Small Winner|Machado de Assis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1311991278s/909746.jpg|605176], or Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas if you prefer, not caught my heart. On the other is the double edged sword of inspired completionism, for I gave as much benefit of the doubt to this piece due to its favorable predecessor as I unfavorably compared it to said former and the same. It doesn't help that my average reviewer persona emulates de Assis' narrator to such an incessant degree (albeit with more cursing on my part), so the bias, whichever direction it runs, is there.
Whatever the case, unlike EoaSW, this did not prove a favorite. To be fair, I would likely have had to dedicate myself to fin de siècle and older literature for some time before picking this up to appreciate it, as much of the turns and tricks it espouses have become borderline conventional today unless your world is composed solely of Tristram Shandy and epistolary novels, of course). As such, I did not, and despite doing my best to put myself in the mindset of past me encountering de Assis' earlier work, the first of this purported trilogy which DC is the last, I still found myself less than titillated. This can be conjectured from the fact that all the quotes I found worthwhile are nearly pure authorial digression and have little or nothing to do with the text that supposedly birthed them. Admittedly, there's a particular chunk of text that is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I've ever come across, but as it is another nearly stand alone thought exercise rather than an integral part of gunpowder, treason and plot, I feel comfortable treating with it separately.
Somewhere down the line I heard that DC is a text taught in Brazilian schools of the pre-collegiate levels. I haven't bothered to fact check this, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, as for all of de Assis' eccentricities, he does in fact deliver a cohesive plot that, as it occurs for the most part in the mind and heart of an imagined fifteen year old boy, would have a strong appeal to that portion of the classroom which usually dominates the discourse. However, despite how much of a theoretical benefit of a doubt the afterword's author insists on giving de Assis', the thematic focus is, stripped of its fripperies, a mere repetition of toxic masculine mundanities, and all the tension promised in the beginning by a sensitive and inquisitive young boy peters out in the solidness of paranoia, possessiveness, and funerals overseas. I could bend over backwards and into that untrustworthy narrator guise, but it'd still be less interesting than the dead nobleman in this work's predecessor.
I'm going to leave off on a positive note, cause seriously, how many black writers writing in translation in the 19th century do you know off the top of your head? Alexandre Dumas is one, Alexander Pushkin another to a degree (what is with all these Alexanders I wonder), and I'm going to have to keep digging from here on out. The foreword even states that de Assis took especial pride in his black ancestry during a time when antiblack slavery still existed in his homeland, which is just fucking fabulous. There's also that God and Satan opera business I referred to, which if I was less tired and more careless about copyrights and such I'd type out right here, but seeing as both characteristics are holding in place, I'll simply let interested parties know that the sequence may be found on the eighteenth through the twentieth pages of this particular edition. Apparently this is an unabridged type, so be careful that your chosen copy hasn't chopped out a redeeming feature or two.
If you find anything similar in this book, dear reader, let me know, so that I can correct it in the second edition: there's nothing worse than giving the longest of legs to the shortest of ideas.