An old man sets out to prove his wife betrayed him — and ends up proving something else entirely about himself.
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Machado de Assis' 1899 novel is the greatest in the Portuguese language and one of the slyest ever written: Bento swears Capitu was unfaithful, and never once gives you a shred of proof.
The whole case rests on a narrator you were never supposed to trust. Read word by word, you catch Machado's irony in the act — in his own Brazilian Portuguese.
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