Dom Casmurro 4.9 · 4.9

The care is almost surgical: he cut the trousers short 'para que lhe ficassem bem esticadas' — so they would sit perfectly taut, no wrinkle, no slack, pulled smooth by the foot-straps. The fussiness is the point. José Dias's vanity of dress is exhaustive, a whole small engineering of appearance, and it rhymes with the vanity of his talk — the same wish to present a flawless, stretched-tight surface. A man who arranges his trousers with this precision is a man who arranges his sentences, and his tale-bearing, with the same anxious craft.

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