Good Character Descriptions

Everything about the man - his face, his body - seemed to have been formed asymmetrically. Tengo noticed this right away. Of course, all people's bodies are asymmetrical to some extent: that in itself was not contrary to the laws of nature. Tengo himself was aware that his own two eyelids had slightly different shapes, and his left testicle hung slightly lower than the right one. Our bodies are not mass- produced in a factory according to fixed standards. But in this man's case, the differences between right and left went far beyond the bounds of common sense. The imbalance, obvious to any observer, could not help but annoy those in his presence and cause them the same kind of discomfort they would feel in front of a fun house mirror. The man's gray suit had countless wrinkles, which made it look like an expanse of earth that had been ground down by a glacier. One flap of his white dress shirt's collar was sticking out, and the knot of his tie was contorted, as if it had twisted itself from the sheer discomfort of having to exist in that place. The suit, the shirt, and the tie were all slightly wrong in size. The pattern on his tie might have been an inept art student's impressionistic rendering of a bowl of tangled, soggy noodles. Each piece of clothing looked like something he had bought at a discount store to fill an immediate need. But the longer Tengo studied them, the sorrier he felt for the clothes themselves, for having to be worn by this man. [..] If he had to compile a list of the worst dressers he had met in the past ten years, this man would be somewhere near the top. It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes.

She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the drying day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment