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?
You guys came up with some great examples, and I was heartened to see so many favorites of mine. There’s so many new, to me, as well! Thanks!
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro.
Virginia Woolf’s The waves
Yesss, I can’t believe it hasn’t been mentioned before! Every word, every sentence is pure, condensed beauty. It’s like a poem written in prose.
The pillow book of Sei Shonagon
You read Heian Japanese?
This is How You Lose the Time War
This book was far past what my tolerance for purple prose is
Hyperion by Dan Simmons had some moments where i just stopped and thought, “that was a damn good sentence.”
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.
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.
Yes!
Octavia Butler, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jhumpa Lahiri are among the few who have stopped me in my tracks.
+1 for Steinbeck, East of Eden has so many of these moments
I just started reading East of Eden and wow!! It really encapsulates the human condition really well.
Love in the Time of Cholera. My GOD.
I know, right?
I could not read more than 1 chapter of The Master and Margarita at a time on my first run through because everything about it knocked my socks off continually. So beautiful.
Same
Steinbeck in Cannery Row, F. Scott Fitzgerald in a collection of short stories (sorry, I can’t recall the title)
First paragraph in Cannery Row is sublime
The opening and closing of A river runs through it. My god. Such brilliance
Yes, this
I can’t pick out specific passages right now, but I did this multiple times each with Madame Bovary and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
The first paragraph of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn…❤️
Anything by Wallace Stegner
Oh hell yes