A fine if elusive find for aficionados of world literature.
A beguilingly slippery tale by Brazil’s greatest proto-modernist writer.
Bento Santiago is known to his friends as Bentinho. But, at the beginning of Machado de Assis’ 1899 novel, he has earned the sobriquet Dom Casmurro, meaning something like “Sir Stubbornly Self-Absorbed,” for falling asleep when a budding poet assailed him with verse on a train ride. Bentinho, whom we meet as an aging, moderately prosperous attorney, is part of a minor noble rural family that moved to Rio de Janeiro and settled in a well-to-do neighborhood (Machado makes much, subtly, of Rio’s rich-and-poor geography). There, at 15, he falls in love with 14-year-old neighbor Capitu. Tensions face him as his now-widowed mother wheedles him to honor a pledge she’s made to God that her firstborn son will become a priest, while Capitu tries to dissuade him. Bentinho enters the seminary all the same and befriends Escobar, a young man who wants to be a merchant, not a priest. Both break free, and Bentinho and Capitu marry. But why does their son, a gifted mimic, do one impersonation better than all others? As Bentinho says, after all, “There’s even something about the way he walks, about his eyes, that reminds me of Escobar....” Bentinho has always been jealous over the beautiful Capitu—in a meaningful scene, she exchanges woo-pitching glances with a rider passing by her window—but even as Capitu protests that Bentinho is his son’s real father, he embodies the meaning of his nickname. The trick of this short novel is that the reader must decide whom to believe, for much suggests that Bentinho is not a trustworthy narrator, while Capitu is alternately characterized as both sly and faithful. Whatever the case, in this readable translation (the use of a few creaky expressions such as flibbertigibbet notwithstanding), Machado proves himself a gifted portraitist of flawed human characters who harbor psychological depths.
A fine if elusive find for aficionados of world literature.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781324090700
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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