[Book 5] Assis

Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

I've been reading this once a year for the last twenty years (+-). The book was assigned to me in school and I fell in love with it immediately. Machado de Assis is, simply put, the best Brazilian literature (or any other) has to offer. It's sad that no translation can really capture the infinite subtleties he skilfully weaves into the text - everything has a meaning - but it's still well worth reading (after all not everybody gets to read Tolstoy or le mot juste Flaubert in their original incarnations).

Dom Casmurro is a humbling masterpiece. In all these years, it has never lost its appeal to me (I still have my first copy full of annotations and commentaries) and I suspect I'll still be wondering about Capitu's betrayal for many years to come.

You'll get sentimental if you stay awake long enough

... and watch enough movies (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, or simply, Amélie). There's more, but my pillow finally looks enticing, instead of the torture device it chose to impersonate through most of the night (with its cruel and crafty ways of never allowing me to find the right position to sleep in).