And just because I’m almost with no money (and there are two weeks until next payment) I bought myself two pocket books, Alice in Wonderland and Dom Casmurro. I’d been thinking in reading them one more time for a long time, and they were cheap, about US$ 8 both of them. I remember Disney’s Alice, I didn’t like that movie too much when I was a kid, but as a teen I found quite bizarre a story about a girl eating/drinking substances who gave her weird dreams – tell me about drugs, LOL
But I’d never found it to buy, so it was a good surprise to find it last Tuesday. And also Dom Casmurro, a Brazilian classical story. Machado de Assis, its author, is well known for his style, he’s a must-read during high school time here. He lived in the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th, and the way he portraits society from that time is full of sarcasm and humor. As many other writers from that time he wrote a lot about marriage and infidelity, and his Dom Casmurro is about those themes too: Bento, its narrator, remembers his life with all its deceptions, including his marriage. He’s sure Capitu, his wife, had an affair with a friend of them and that their son is a result of it. He couldn’t prove that, but to him it was an absolute true. That betrayal had obsessed many people who study Machado books, Capitu’s probably the most popular female character in Brazilian literature. Her behavior is suspicious, but it could be only because Machado described her as an enigmatic woman. Machado’s characteristic writing involves an accurate description of Rio de Janeiro city during those days, and it didn’t help to solve the mystery, a reader ends the story without knowing if Bento was right or not. But although it’s the main question of the whole story it’s great to read about daily miseries of all characters, their idiosyncrasies, how Machado makes Bento wonder about the writing style... yeah, it was good to buy those books, I’ll enjoy them much more now than in the past!