This is a fictional memoir by the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer whom Philip Roth has described as 'a great ironist, a tragic comedian'. "Dom Casmurro" is the story of Bento Santiago, an affluent citizen of Rio who comes to believe in his old age that his beloved wife, Capitu, betrayed him with his best friend for many years. In telling the sometimes sad, sometimes raucous tale of his love for and loss, through jealousy, of Capitu, he reconstructs - and sometimes wildly reimagines - the past in order to make the present more bearable.