For me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera; On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-Ocean Vuong; Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The most tragic, painful, human suffering can be presented and these writers present it in the most excruciatingly beautiful prose.
On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-“A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?”
What is the beauty for you?
I want to say Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel because it was the first book of hers I read and I adore it, but I think Glass Hotel is even more beautiful and lyrical.
Ah, I’m about to finish this book. It is quite pretty. There was a paragraph I highlighted about a snowglobe and all the human lives that made its existence possible that I really liked.
The pillow book of Sei Shonagon
Fitzgerald
Cry the Beloved Country.
“The murderer who is afraid of death was once a child afraid of the dark”
Yes! I read it at school many years ago, and the first line always stuck with me.
“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.”
Hyperion by Dan Simmons had some moments where i just stopped and thought, “that was a damn good sentence.”
One of my favorite quotes from early in the book, in The Priest’s Story:
“If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It must go into the darkness not willingly but well—bravely and firm of faith—like the millions who have gone before us, keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not hopefully, then prayerfully that there is some reason for it all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those sacrifices. All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must I.”
Ok, so like, I started this book. And out of curiosity googled the Rachmaninoff piece the diplomat was playing on the piano during the intro. And like. God. Damn. Perfect. Like, the quintessential definition of atmospheric. The music was the literal transliteration of the mood the prose evoked.
And then got to the whole storyline with the detective and the poet AI and was like. Has this author ever met a woman in real life? Might be a product of the time…
Has this author ever met a woman in real life
This was my primary issue with Hyperion and largely the reason I struggled to enjoy it. I feel like if I were a student of classical literature, it would have resonated differently. But there were so many sexual scenes, and they felt so out of place with the narrative and characters that it frequently broke my suspension of disbelief. Martin Silenius’s story was particularly bad for this. Throughout the whole book, I counted only 2 women (Sarai and the CEO) who were not sexualized in some way.
In fairness, Silenus’s character was specifically written to be a misogynistic “old goat”. Every character has their own biases that bleed through the text. Silenus only sees tragic, self-obsessed assholes everywhere while Weintraub’s story is mostly filled with empathy and genuine human connections. Also notice how everyone talks about all the “indigenies” in this dismissive, condescending way until the Consul’s story.
But with that said, I do generally agree. The author’s biggest weakpoint seems to be writing women.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be Silenus telling the story. But with an author who is already oddly sex-obsessed writing a character even more sex-obsessed, who has the emotional intelligence and vocabulary of a middle school boy at times, it becomes quite a difficult read. Is it possible to execute it well? Certainly. Do I think it was in Hyperion? Not really, no.
“Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”
The wandering Jew’s story was so fucking sad
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
I liked this passage below not so much for its beautiful prose, but for it’s wonderful and profound absurdity.
Once, to make the point that I should study while I was young and learning came easily, my grandfather had told me about a man he knew when he first came to Kansas, a preacher newly settled there. He said, “That fellow just was not confident of his Hebrew. He’d walk fifteen miles across open country in the dead of winter to settle a point of interpretation. We’d have to thaw him out before he could tell us what it was he had on his mind.” My father laughed, and said, “The strange part is, that may even be true.”
I posted it with a bunch of other pieces last week titled On Truth.
I have so many sentences/passages in this book underlined for this very reason.
This was such a beautiful surprise for me
Moby Dick
Yes, it has that biblical grandness to it.
The entire “Whiteness of the Whale” section is incredible
I was too frightened by its reputation to read Moby Dick until my early 40s, and when I finally did I was sucked right in and would talk about it to anyone who’d listen. There’s so much wonderful writing in it - the shared bed scene where Ishmael first meets Queequeg, or where he meets the shipowners in Nantucket. It’s an incredible book.
I just started reading this…not at all what I expected, so far. I can imagine that the prose will be fantastic.
Before they get on the ship is the best part of the book. I was breathless from the story until that point.
Oh yes!
Firefly by Sarduy.
Do not know this. thanks!
Guy Crouchback’s angry eruption in Men at Arms made me stop and pause; I just had to enjoy it slowly.
“Sudden wrath is always alarming, recalling as it does the awful unpredictable dooms of childhood.”
Wonderfully precise. Waugh does in fifteen or so words what would take some authors a paragraph or more.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Caraval series by Stephanie Gatber. Also Sands of Arawiya Duology by Hafsah Faizal. Adored the sentences that looked like poetry
Lolita, 100 Hundred Years of Solitude and Moby Dick have some of the most transcendental prose ever put to page.
I don’t really have a quote handy, but The God Of Small Things by Arundathi Roy had many moments just so evocative of India, Kerala in particular and the world is described so perfectly and wonderfully. The whole book is like this, it’s dense and reads like poetry the entire way through.
Anything by Jack London.
However a lot of outstanding prose is like chocolate. I like short amounts but it can distract from the narrative. There needs to be a balance between ‘keep it simple’ and an author ‘trying too hard’.