To read Machado de Assis is to abandon the comfort of the 19th-century novel. There is no hero’s journey, no redemptive love, no clear moral. Instead, there is the whirlwind of the human soul — petty, grandiose, deluded, and achingly funny. He writes like a man who has seen the worst of his society and the worst of his own heart, and who has decided that the only appropriate response is a quiet, devastating laugh. In the end, his works ask not “What is the meaning of life?” but rather a more uncomfortable question: “Why do you keep pretending that you know?”
This period continues with Quincas Borba (1891) and the apex of his art, Dom Casmurro (1899). If Brás Cubas is a comedic symphony of nihilism, Dom Casmurro is a chamber tragedy of jealousy. The narrator, Bento Santiago (nicknamed “Dom Casmurro,” or “Lord Taciturn”), recounts his love for Capitu, a childhood neighbor with the eyes of “a resaca do mar” — “the undertow of the sea.” The novel’s central question: Did Capitu betray him with his best friend, Escobar? Bento believes he saw the resemblance in their son, Ezequiel. But the reader is left in a vertiginous trap. obras de machado de assis
Machado constructs the perfect unreliable narrative. Bento is a seminarian turned lawyer, a man of law who cannot bear ambiguity. Every piece of “evidence” he presents is filtered through his possessive, pathologically jealous gaze. The famous scene where Capitu looks at Escobar’s corpse with “eyes of a drowned woman” — is it guilt or grief? Machado never tells us. The novel’s genius lies in its structure: it forces the reader to become a detective, a judge, and finally, a doubter. We realize that certainty is a form of cruelty. Dom Casmurro is not about adultery; it is about the corrosive power of jealousy to rewrite memory and destroy love without a single proof. It is arguably the greatest novel of the late 19th century, standing beside The Turn of the Screw as a monument of narrative ambiguity. To read Machado de Assis is to abandon