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?
In one of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker books (I forget which), he writes a chapter with the narrator unspooling an event where two women are headed for a fateful intersection. The old woman is clearly up to something, while the young woman and her baby have suffered a car beakdown in a deserted stretch of forest.
The old woman is likely a practitioner of dark arts, with evil intentions that fit the general direction of the story, and she is headed to do something unspeakable. The young girl woman just had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and something gruesome is going to happen to her as she frets about her situation. It’s an almost unbearable setup, ready to occur violently in the primal, moody Maine woods.
Yet when the old woman pulls up to the young woman’s car, we see that everything we thought would happen plays out in reverse.
It’s a masterclass of writing that had me reread that chapter three or four times to get an idea of how Connolly pulled off the switcheroo so elegantly. I read that a dozen years ago or so, and I am still impressed. That Charlie Parker series has some exceptional writing, especially of setting, internal character dialog, and mood.