Book dossier

O Alienista

by Machado de Assis

Who's crazy? This is the question proposed in this book. In this narrative, Machado de Assis tells the story of the eminent Dr. Simão Bacamarte. Dedicated scholar of the human mind, the doctor decides to build a ' Green House '-a mental hospital to treat the mentally ill in the small town of Itaguaí. Machado leads to its history and maintains that everything is relative and that normality is not always what the science and the facts attest to absolute form.