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?
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.