“Christopher Nolan didn’t invent reverse chronology story telling, but his film title “Memento” is the easiest to make into a verb: mementoize." to tell a story in reverse order, as in the film “Memento” (2000) by director Christopher Nolan. Review of the Daunt Books paperback edition (2015) of the Portuguese language original (1899)Īfter 6 weeks of very, very slow reading, I had to take this book down the mementoize route. All in all, I respect the work, but I can't say I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I just wasn't ever completely engaged by the tale, and I didn't find the end to be satisfying because as the reader, we actually don't know the real truth.
To me, the brilliance of this book is mostly based on how cutting edge it must have been at the time of its writing. The author does a great job of keeping the reader's empathy with Bentinho for a great deal of the book. It turns out that Bentinho is an unreliable narrator, and it also becomes apparent that he has a jealous streak. In addition, Bentinho breaks the third wall, much like House of Cards, and talks to the reader from time to time. The story is related in very, very short chapters, which I liked. Bentinho's mother promised to God that Bentinho would go to the seminary and become a priest, but he falls in love with the next door neighbor's daughter and is unwilling to fulfill his destiny as conceived by his mother. It is written as a fictional memoir narrated by one character, Bentinho. (Aug.Dom Casmurro is unusually modern storytelling for a book written at the end of the 1800's. Deftly translated, Dom Casmurro is a book full of humor, sweetness and a tender melancholy-a book that deserves to be read. It is marked by his fantastic imagination, both comic (as when he consults with maggots who are eating books he needs for a dissertation) and tragic (evidence of his beloved wife's infidelity is circumstantial at best). This upper- middle-class Brazilian society of the last century ( Dom Casmurro was first published in 1899) is the setting for Betinho's transformation from a coddled only child to the middle-aged Dom Casmurro, or Lord Taciturn. However, Betinho has been promised since conception to the priesthood, a glitch that allows de Assis to describe a community so familiar with God that bargaining with Him is as common as haggling with the butcher. Enter jealousy, exit happiness and boy/narrator, Betinho, who goes on to write his magnum opus, the History of the Suburbs.
It's the simplest of stories: boy falls in love with girl next door, they grow up, marry and have a child.
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