His musical composition matches the tautness of the novel, and what he calls its "almost total lack of diffuseness".
This they owe primarily to their form, in which for the first time bombast and tedious rhetoric are replaced by variety, brevity, tautness, and precision of style; as Nicolas Boileau, the founder of French literary criticism, recognized, they marked the beginning of modern French prose.
In performance the erhu is held upright on the performer's thigh, and the tautness of the bow strings is determined by the pressure of the performer's hand.
As standard, that drops the car by 15mm but in the AMG Line trim you get extra tautness in the handling as well.
Key to these are the smooth-shifting, six-speed, double-clutch gearbox, individual controls for engine and gearbox responsiveness, steering weighting and suspension tautness, and the fact that the engine produces a massive 502lb/ft of torque all the way from 1,500 to 5,750rpm.
A thousand men indistinguishable except for the colour of their helmets and the tautness of their lycra speed past, and if you happen to blow your nose they've gone.
It goes where pointed and rides with enough suppleness to be comfortable, enough tautness not to heave and wallow.
"Mr. Condo makes things that look like paintings, that have the presence, completeness, and frontal tautness of paintings, yet in some essential way they are not so much paintings as artifacts, signs of another time and place," the Times critic Roberta Smith wrote in 1988.
But there's always some give to the tautness.
It was losing the everyday dramatic tautness that had once prevailed: the expectation that almost perfect baseball would be played, inning after inning, and that winning a game would therefore require something exceptional to happen out there.
His theme could hardly be less original (think of "Bonjour Tristesse"), but the tautness is that of a horror film.
