Claire Williams

speaker

137 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Claire Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Machado de Assis · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And Casmuro is a term which means grumpy, basically.

Yes, exactly.

And in the first chapter of this novel, again, in the first chapter, that's where they give themselves, start to give themselves away.

I think the reader gives them a bit of benefit of the doubt, but very soon we start to spot contradictions and realise that we need to

think very hard about what they're saying before we trust them.

So he tells us in the first chapter, oh, a young poet called me Don Cosmo when I didn't take his poems seriously.

And I accepted that title.

But dear reader, don't go and look up in the dictionary.

I will tell you what this means.

It means somebody who is very quiet, a recluse.

And of course, what does the reader do?

The first thing we do is to go and look it up.

And it means grumpy, stubborn.

And I think this is a very early example of mansplaining.

So we get these male characters who tell the women what to do, get very frustrated when they don't know what they're thinking and are seduced by their beauty to a certain extent.

Very possibly.

I think he creates these very resourceful, practical, strategic female characters because they are the ones who are going to educate the sons and the Brazilians of the future.

And...

Clearly, nobody wants the Brazilians of the future to be like Bento or Bras Cubas because society will fail just as they have failed.

And I think one of the things that's interesting is that in these novels, none of the protagonists have children who survive past the end of the book.

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