Concluding thoughts on the excellence of Machado's Dom Casmurro

A few additional notes on J Machado's excellent novel Dom Casmurro (1900): The title (which is the nickname that the narrator sometimes uses among friends) doesn't seem terribly important to me, but as far as I can make out it could translate as Sir Stubborn, or something like that. This novel was published in English a few years ago as part of a projected Library of Latin America, an obvious attempt to create a series much like the great Library of America series; it never seems to have achieved lift-off, however. This edition is handsome, and the translation, by John Gledson, seems to be excellent as well - can't vouch for its fidelity, but it reads really well with only a few typos. Gledson also write a good intro (though I recommend reading it after reading the novel - it would be too hard to follow otherwise) and he translated the afterword by a scholar of Brazilian literature - don't bother reading that academic, impenetrable piece. The time and space would have been better used with a Machado timeline, alongside a timeline of Latin American and world literature and  Brazilian history. Gledson rightly emphasizes the significance of slavery in this novel - something most academic critics seem to have passed over lightly - and he points out the many similarities w/ Othello (which the narrator himself recognizes), something I should have pointed out in previous posts - a particularly poignant literary echo given Machado's black ancestry. He also notes the echos of Tristram Shandy - the narrator commenting throughout on his own writing, sometimes in hilarious asides - though who knows of Machado was familiar w/ that work. Most of all, it's both a funny and incredibly sad novel, and as with many great pieces of literary fiction we are in some ways more aware than the narrator himself: We can see around him, around the brave front that he puts on and recognize, as he doesn't or at least doesn't admit, that he has ruined his life.