Brazilian Loser

DOM CASMURRO (283 pp.)--Machado de Assis--Noonday ($3.50).

When Machado de Assis' Epitaph of a Small Winner was published in the U.S. last summer (TIME, July 31), reviewers set up a cheer over the strange new star caught in their literary telescopes. Acclaimed in his own land and lifetime (1839-1908) as Brazil's greatest man of letters, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis would doubtless have relished the irony of this posthumous foreign recognition for a novel whose hero is a garrulous ghost, bent on describing his own small genius for failure while alive. Dom Casmurro is a more poignant and more muted Epitaph of a Small Winner, but anyone with a slight case of TV-jeebies can find a good evening's entertainment in it.

Dom Casmurro is the narrator-hero's nickname, and it translates, roughly, as Lord Sourpuss. The story he has to tell is a kind of epitaph of a big loser, a man who, through his wife's infidelity, loses her, his best friend and his son.

Dom Casmurro's real name is Bento, and he does not start out a sourpuss. At the age of 15, Bento's head is full of great but nebulous expectations: "After Napoleon, lieutenant and emperor, all destinies are possible in this century." His heart throbs for Capitu, a dark-haired Juliet with "eyes like the tide when the undertow is strong." Bento's mother had dedicated him to the church at birth, but the seminary is not for Bento. He wins his release along with a seminarist friend named Ezekiel, and goes off to law school. Then he comes home to win the hand of Capitu.

The wedding day is rainy, a lucky omen in Brazil, and the wedding night so blissful that Author Machado slyly warns the reader: "Don't worry, I do not intend to describe it; human language does not possess forms proper to so great a task." Lucky in love, Bento is also lucky at law, partly because good friend Ezekiel shunts cases his way. And when Capitu bears a son, Bento insists on naming the child Ezekiel.

When the boy first mimics his namesake, both parents find it cute, but when he persists in it, Bento is irked and his wife scolds the child. As little Ezekiel grows to look more like big Ezekiel year by year, the cancer of a doubt spreads in Bento's mind. It is resolved when big Ezekiel drowns in a swimming accident and Bento sees the look of naked desolation on his wife's face.

Author Machado has his hero flirt with suicide and murder before he turns him into a philosophical autobiographer. What keeps Dom Casmurro from being a routine triangle drama is the wit and wisdom with which Author Machado embroiders his plot. As in Epitaph of a Small Winner, he breaks into his story with joshing asides to the reader, e.g., "Perhaps I'll scratch this out when it goes to press," "Shake your head, reader. Make all the gestures of incredulity there are." His piece of advice hardest to follow: "Throw away this book."

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