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?

  • KnowsAboutMath@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Kurt Vonnegut’s description, in Slaughterhouse-Five, of Billy Pilgrim watching the film backwards:

    It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.

      • cheshirecatds@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I love this novel. It’s such an interesting concept and the particular scenario he chooses is so fitting (similar to Slaughterhouse).

    • EpsilonCru@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      makes me think we’re living some cursed life where we’re experiencing time in the wrong direction

    • Elixartist@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Weirdly I’m reading this now and love the book but found this one bit slightly tedious.

      • NewW0nder@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        Maybe it’s a matter of personal experience. There are things that won’t really resonate with you unless you yourself went through them, and no great prose can make you truly feel and understand what the writer felt. Words can be weak that way.

        In that book, Vonnegut is talking about war — something he experienced intimately. If you’re lucky enough to have never been through war, then in this excerpt, you might see prose that’s irrelevant to you. But someone touched by war will see a helpless, hopeless wish for that war to have never happened, because there’s nothing, nothing worse and more terrible than war. Vonnegut wants the war plane pilots — those sky murderers — to go back to the hopeful kids they once were, and the shells and missiles to go back to earth as minerals that can’t hurt anyone.

        If you’ve never feared a missile hitting you or your house, you’ll likely find that bit boring and rambling, and I’m glad for you. But people who know that fear, will know just how real Vonnegut’s words are, and how powerful, and how heartfelt.

        • darkerside@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          Agree. The more you grow to understand the amount of effort that we put into killing each other, especially in the World Wars, the more probably it becomes to consider spending so much time and effort doing the reverse. It’s hard to fathom the scope of these massive human operations.

          Also, I know the prose is a bit plain, but like Hemingway, he conveys such beauty with such plain words.

        • FarArdenlol@alien.topB
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          1 year ago

          Exactly, I love that book but its prose is nothing to write home about.

          Slaughterhouse-Five was always more about the concept, theme and underlining message than prose or writing style.

    • bebebotanica@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Re-reading this now for class, finishing my bachelors at 32. When I first read this at 14, in the middle of the Iraq conflict, it’s like I got it but I just didn’t get how hard this hit. War is truly maddening.

    • ayotacos@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      Reminds me of the ending of Come and See where we watch the events leading up to Hitler’s rise in reverse. From psycopath and cities of rubble to an innocent baby.

      • just_a_wolf@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        I always loved the way Vonnegut wrote precisely because the utter simplicity made it even more of a gut punch.