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?
I’m not sure if nonfiction counts, but I am genuinely awestruck at the achingly beautiful language Dara McAnulty weaves in Diary of a Young Naturalist. Doubly so because he wrote it when he was 15!
“I’m lying on the ground looking up at the branches of an oak tree. Dappled light is shining through the canopy, the leaves whisper ancient incantations. This tree, in its living stage, rooted in sights and sounds that I’ll never know, has witnessed extinctions and wars, loves and losses. I wish we could translate the language of trees – hear their voices, know their stories. They host such an astonishing amount of life – there are thousands of species harbouring in and on and under this mighty giant. And I believe trees are like us, or they inspire the better parts of human nature. If only we could be connected in the way this oak tree is connected with its ecosystem.”
“The gravel path ahead is covered in leathery beech leaves, and they squelch or crunch depending on whether the water is running of the Sitka bank. The leaf litter suddenly changes to sweet chestnut. I touch the furrowed bark of one tree, my fingers settling in the grooves. We pause by a pond, still as glass until gentle ripples are set off by fish below the surface. The water is earth-brown and surrounded by widely spaced conifers and some goat willows iwth low-lying, outstretched branches almost touching the water. Suddenly, there are cones raining down. We stop to look up, spotting an auburn shape tousling the branches of a Sitka tree. We crane our heads until the cold seeps in. The movement stops and the red squirrel just seems to vanish into thin air.”