by Bacopa Literary Review 2016-17 Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie
Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers
[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl,
inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] "The glossy
brownish organs . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made
life possible and which everyone -- from a mouse to a man -- had pumping
and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin" (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).
"Her
light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on
her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and
curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across
one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure,
well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye
dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face" (Thomas Mann, "Tristan"). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]
[description
of a delicatessen] "there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel,
lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the
appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their
claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from
open boxes; choice fruits -- garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful
as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins
and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras . . . " (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]
"She'd never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age" (Lauren Groff, "For the God of Love, for the Love of God").
