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!
I don’t have the book handy, but there were a number of points during The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon where I had to stop to appreciate just how nicely constructed a sentence or paragraph was.
The final paragraph of the Road by Cormac McCarthy:
“Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Toni Morrison. Ugh, her writing puts me in a chokehold
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Pushkin poetry in original.
Ditto on the Marquez. He’s pissed me off, I’m tired of his sad old men protagonists, but you can’t deny his prose is amazing.
There’s a lot of good stuff in the Russian classics but last time I reread Gogol’s overcoat it hit just as hard.
Recently reading Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys I full on broke down at two different parts. Like ugly crying and not just because it was a sad moment - there was too much going on in my head as a result of the writing for me to process.
Moby Dick for sure
On The Road. The best description I ever saw of the prose was that it’s the written equivalent of improv jazz. The scene where they’re sleeping in jungle and Sal(?) is on top of the car is particularly beautiful imo; it’s so descriptive and it raises up something kind of gross and unpleasant and turns it into an almost spiritual experience.
Takes me twice as long to get through Rothfuss as any other book at that page count for this reason.