SECOND READING: 37

Dom Casmurro By Machado De Assis (1899)IT ALL BEGINS gently, sedately; the narrator, apparently an older man, recalls meeting a young acquaintance on the evening train.

The younger man writes poetry and recites some of his efforts. The narrator makes the mistake of falling asleep which causes great offence. Welcome to the brilliantly observed small world of the remarkable Brazilian master who looked to his immediate experience as effectively as did Jane Austen.

Dom Casmurro, means 'Lord Taciturn' the nickname that the insulted poet confers on Bentinho Santiago, the narrator, who seems not all that bothered.

He sets about introducing himself: "I live on my own, with one servant. The house where I live is my own property, and I had it built for a very special reason which I hesitate to admit, but no matter."

The relaxed, conversational tone continues and without making much of a fuss he admits that in building it he was hoping to recreate the loving home of his youth. He has his "gentle, beguiling" memories. "To be honest I don't go out much and I converse even less. I have few pastimes. Most of my time, I spend in my orchard, gardening and reading. I eat well and I don't sleep badly." Yet he requires an additional occupation so decides to write.

Machado De Assis has been compared with Mozart, sharing the composer's disarming grace and artistic power. In this unsettling novel, his finest achievement in a career which produced more than 200 stories and nine novels, de Assis, a mulatto, a senior civil servant and obviously a major influence on his most famous literary descendant Portugal's 1998 Nobel Literature Laureate Jose Saramago, continually surprises the reader through a series of subtle shifts. Having considered writing a History of the Suburbs Santiago casually drifts into telling his own story.

Looking back over a gulf of some 40 years he evokes his boyhood self, the adored son of a beautiful, kindly widow who made a grateful pact with the Lord. Dona Gloria has vowed that her only child will become a priest. The household is also home to the gregarious José Dias, an inherently conspiratorial former dependent of the narrator's dead father. Old Dias "loved superlatives. They served to give grandiosity to his ideas and, when these were lacking, to prolong his sentences."

He likes to be involved in any decision making and he quickly develops into one of the several vividly drawn characters who play their part in shaping the man Santiago will become. All talk is of the day the youth will set off for the seminary and his destiny.

There are complications; the boy's closest friend is Capitu, the girl next door. As our hero becomes increasingly confused by his changing emotions, she responds with impressive resourcefulness. It is not surprising that she has remained one of the central characters of Brazilian literature. She is intriguingly ambivalent and this element heightens the emerging darkness of a narrative which had begun as a charming memoir fraught with furtive teenage romance. The narrator does attend the seminary for a time and becomes friendly with Escobar who doesn't have a vocation either. Their friendship is so intense that their respective marriages are absorbed by it.

Santiago qualifies as a lawyer and arranges his narrative as if it was a legal case. The facts are considered. Throughout de Assis presents his narrator pausing to address the reader as if she - and he does presume that the reader is female - were the jury. The plot twists are worthy of Stendhal or Somerset Maugham as the extent of Santiago's cold retreat becomes terrifyingly clear.

De Assis writes with the ironic elegance of a 19th century Russian while harsh social realities of the Brazil of his day such as slavery - Dona Gloria keeps slaves - and leprosy are merely referred to in passing. When de Assis died in 1908, age 69, there was a state funeral and national mourning. Reading his dazzling, quietly sophisticated work makes it easy to understand why he is revered.

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This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon