Dom Casmurro

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. His name is Bentinho. He acquired the nickname Dom Casmurro — Lord Taciturn, Lord Sullen — from a poet on a train whose conversation he rudely ignored, and the name stuck, and he has grown into it. He is old now, living alone in a house he has built as a replica of his childhood home, in an attempt to recover a past the reconstruction immediately reveals as unrecoverable. He writes his memoirs. He wants you to understand what happened.

What happened is this: he loved Capitu since childhood — his neighbor, his opposite, the one who always understood the world more quickly and more completely than he did, whose eyes he describes as olhos de ressaca, undertow eyes, riptide eyes, the eyes of someone whose depths you cannot safely measure. They married, after obstacles he recounts in detail. His best friend Escobar drowned. At the funeral, standing over the coffin, Capitu wept with an intensity that Bentinho could not explain to himself except in one way.

The question cannot be answered. That is not a limitation of the novel. It is the novel's central and most precise achievement — the recognition that the most important questions in a human life are often exactly the ones that memory and jealousy and the retrospective intelligence have made permanently, irresolvably unclear.

One of the great novels of world literature — and still, more than a century later, the most searching account in any language of what jealousy does to the past it touches.