Dom Casmurro 4.1 · 4.1

One of the most celebrated character-sentences in Brazilian fiction, and Machado sets it down like a verdict: 'José Dias amava os superlativos.' The whole man is in it. His speech, his self-importance, his 'dever amarissimo' at the close of the last chapter — all of it flows from this love of the outsized word. The narrator has stepped out of the scene to anatomize the man who set his fate in motion, and he begins not with José Dias's motives but with his grammar, on the shrewd principle that how a person inflates their language tells you how they inflate everything.

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