Dom Casmurro 9.24 · 9.24

The tenor rounds off his enthusiasm with a critic's verdict: 'muitos bailados, e a orchestração é excellente'—many ballets, and the orchestration is excellent. He is now reviewing life as if it were a production he admired, praising its spectacle and its scoring. The trailing ellipsis lets the appreciation run on, the old man carried away by his own conceit.

The praise of the 'orchestração' quietly sets up the fuller theory the chapter will reach, where the music of the world has a composer with a darker reputation than its librettist. For now the tenor is simply delighted—life is a lavish show, well mounted, richly played. Machado suspends him at the height of his approval precisely so the narrator can interrupt, puncturing the rapture with a doubt the reader has been holding all along.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I