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?
Is rating a book’s prose an American thing? Literally never heard it used in a sentence before, by definition it is a style of writing not a measurement of quality and when you google it you get 10 different definitions when used in that context.
I’ve always thought of prose more as a way to differentiate writing from poetry.
That’s what I thought too but it’s like the only thing people use here