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?
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.
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.
This makes a lot of sense