Reading time: Just over 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from David Bezmozgis…

Born in Latvia, David Bezmozgis is a writer and filmmaker based in Toronto. In the summer of 2010, he was included in The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40” issue, celebrating the twenty most promising fiction writers under the age of forty. Over the years, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Radcliffe Fellow.

I just finished his most recent collection of short stories, Immigrant City, and I put down the book feeling impressed. Told with sharp humour and a discerning eye, the stories explore a variety of immigrant experiences.

David Bezmozgis also makes superb use of figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:

• By the last stop the train had nearly emptied out, leaving few representatives of white privilege. Those who remained looked pallid and desiccated, as if they’d been too weak to flee with the others.
• People were always offering writers their stories, I thought. But those were rarely the stories writers wanted. Those stories were looked at as children who always raised their hands in class. Good stories didn’t raise their hands.
• Our elevator arrived; the heavy metal doors enacted their grim choreography.
• Through my visor I looked at the Armenian poet and playwright, who now seemed crisper, better articulated, as when the correct lens is snapped into place at the optometrist’s.
• The heart barks like a dog.
• It was as if some primordial, Jewish boy-face had surfaced with time, rounding and softening features, imbuing a fatherly, grandfatherly, even ancestral lachrymosity as from the headwaters of the biblical patriarchs.
• He never had a cellphone, and my mother, aunt and uncle called him routinely. If he didn’t answer, nodes of panic would aggregate like birds on a roof and occasionally erupt in a spasm of flapping.
• All of which probably didn’t bode well for the man in handcuffs, who sat in the prisoner’s dock looking not so much like a criminal but rather like a weary commuter waiting for the train.
• His neck and his ankles were thin, and he was pale in the manner of someone who is either very sick or very spartan.

[Photo credit: Dan Harasymchuk. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.]

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Nov. 7/19.

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from Rachel Kushner….

Rachel Kushner is an American writer, currently living in Los Angeles. Her fourth and most recent novel (2024), Creation Lake, was long-listed for the National Book Award for fiction and short-listed for the Booker Prize.

While I found the story — about a freelance spy who works to undermine environmental activists — to be both frustrating and not as interesting as it should have been, I found Kushner’s writing to be remarkable.

Kushner has an acute eye and ear for both simile and metaphor. Here are my favourite examples from her book:

• The air was damp and warm and close, like human breath.
• The rain had left enormous puddles that were the tint of milk chocolate, their surface silk-screened in sky.
• The hills above Vantôme were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition.
• I was driving with an animal liberation activist in my passenger seat, a freckle boy aged twenty-three with a fringe of fluffy read beard-hair attached to his jawline like drapery tassel.
• Lucien and I took the TGV from Gare de Lyon to Marseille, riding backward in a swaying first-class train car a canister of modern French technology tearing through French countryside at three hundred kilometers an hour, farmers and rolling hills and little medieval villages being pulled backward as if by a monster vacuum cleaner was sucking the landscape into its unseen mouth.
• Platon also berated his assigned driver, an older man with a jaundiced complexion and hooded eyes that were the blue of mentholated cough drops.
• A woman with platinum upswept hair and diamond earrings sat eating French fries, daubing each slender fry in ketchup as if dipping a sable brush into a dollop of red paint.
• The rosé was delicate and fruity, crisp as ironed linen.
• It [a heron] took sideways steps, its large beak like gardening shears holding the gopher.
• As I walked, the high sun illuminated uncanny colors in the limestone, colors so vibrant and bright they looked artificial. Some areas were lavender but patterned with lichen that was gold-bright, like ground turmeric. Other lichens were creamy white and stretched along the rock face like embroidery.

Reading time: Less than 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of images from David Szalay….

The writer David Szalay was born in Montreal to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. (His surname is pronounced SOL-loy.) Although his family moved to Beirut when he was young, they were forced to leave Lebanon and move to London after the onset of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. Szalay studied at Oxford University. He now lives in Budapest, with his wife and two children.

He is the author of five works of fiction including All That Man Is, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2016. Turbulence which I read recently and very much enjoyed, is a series of 12 linked short stories following different people on flights around the world. It explores the theme of globalization of family and friendship in the 21st century. (Szalay has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC. Turbulence, in fact, began as a series of 15-minute programs for BBC Radio 4.)

Although the writing is colder and a little plainer than writing I typically enjoy, I found that Szalay has a deft eye and ear for figurative language.

Here are my favourite examples:

• She stirred airline Bloody Mary with a little plastic baton. The engines purred in slow rhythmic waves. She felt the vodka work on her. The tightly packed fabric of the world seemed to loosen.
• She turned to the window and found only her own face in the dark plastic now, deeply shadowed lie a landscape at sundown.
• There was the sound of the engines — an unvarying sound like a large waterfall somewhere nearby — that muffled all other sounds so that it seemed as if she had stuffing in her ears.
• Bougainvillea blossoms floated on the water like scraps of pink tissue paper.

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Oct. 24/19.

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphors and similes from Coco Mellors…

Coco Mellors is a British writer living in the U.S. and known for her work in novels, copywriting, journalism, and scriptwriting.

Mellors earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from New York University (NYU). She has openly discussed her struggles with alcoholism during her teenage and early adult years in New York, achieving sobriety while writing her debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which she completed at the age of 26.

Her latest novel, Blue Sisters, earned rave reviews (from publications like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar) but struck me as over-hyped. Still, it included some lovely figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:

• Though her body is like a vaulted oak door, her nature is transparent as window.
• Recently, without the approval of her [modelling] agency, she has chopped off most of her hair and bleached it white. Now, she looks like a combination Barbie, Billy Idol, and a Siberian husky.
• He had the coloring of a golden retriever and the same seemingly indiscriminate desire to please.
• Sometimes, Avery saw Chiti’s desire to love her mother breach the surface of her disdain like a seal cub peaking its head above the ocean.
• The walls were pink, to the color of the inside of a throat.
• The floor kept giving way beneath her like a bouncy castle.
• His words popped against her skin like bubbles.
• Bonnie felt all the life in this home rushing just beneath the surface of the present moment, like running water trapped beneath a layer of ice.
• The house was in a worse state than she’s remembered. Clusters of shingles had fallen off the roof like bald patches on a head.
• The cool air whispered around her skin. Around the pond, a leafy canopy of trees sighed and rustled as if politely rearranging themselves.
  

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from Fern Brady….

Fern Brady is a Scottish comedian, podcaster and writer. She achieved fame as a stand-up comedian at venues like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Brady was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum in 2021. She has been active within the field of autism education since learning of her diagnosis.

In her 2023 memoir, Strong Female Character, Brady recounts her life as an undiagnosed autistic woman, navigating challenges including family misunderstandings, mental health struggles, and societal pressures. The book is a candid and often amusing exploration of her experiences, from her youth as a solitary and misunderstood child to her later years in sex work and comedy.

Through her book, Brady addresses the intersection of autism, sexism, and class, offering a powerful and relatable account of resilience and self-discovery. She also displays some tremendous — and often funny — figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:

• This was standard Scottish Catholic parenting: children were not the longed-for IVF children of the middle-aged middle class — pampered investments that you needed to see a return on — but something dealt to you in life that you just had to cope with, like a caner or a chronic illness.”
• Toodaloo approached piety like they say Pope Benedict XVI did, like God’s Rottweiler, continually making big belligerent pronouncements on the state of the world.
• My maternal grandmother was more like a normal granny in that she openly loved me and wasn’t repulsed at the thought of showing me affection. She was way harder to read, though, and could only communicate her displeasure through a series of throat-clearings, tuts and clicks that social anthropologist would be interested in studying.
• My flatmates sprang into action to comfort me. Lauren opened a bottle of Prosecco and rushed it towards me like a paramedic with IV fluids.

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about  metaphors from Sigrid Nunez…

Sigrid Nunez is a talented American author who won the 2018 US National Book Award for Fiction for her seventh novel, The Friend, a book I devoured last year.

I wish I could say I was as delighted with her more recent work, The Vulnerables. The story of female narrator during Covid, the book asks what it means to be alive at this moment in history as she interacts with a troubled member of Gen Z and a parrot named Eureka. Overall, I found the book to be rather tedious and plodding. That said, it won a truckload of “best book of the year” awards from NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Irish Times, the New Republic and Kirkus Reviews.

And Nunez can wield an apt image and a breathtaking sentence. Here are my favourite examples from the very short book:

• The gaudy tulips…seems almost like wild mouths screaming for attention.
• He sat in one of the front rows, hunched an absolutely still. Prey-still. You could see the blush creeping up the back of his neck, darkly, steadily, as if red paint were being poured into a hole in his skull, and then his ears, seeming to grow even larger as they engorged with blood.
• She didn’t crumple, the way a person usually does when they faint. She went down like a chopped tree.
• These days, the writer strikes me as someone who is becoming less like a creative artist and more like a politician: ever evasive, fixate on construal.

[Photo: Library of Congress. Cropped. Public domain.]

Reading time: About one minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about the metaphors of Liz Moore….

Liz Moore  is an American author and an Associate Professor of English at Temple University, where she serves as the Creative Writing Director. After a brief time as a musician in New York City, which inspired her first novel, The Words of Every Song, Moore shifted her focus to writing.

Her most recent book, The God of the Woods, tells the story of a participant at a summer camp who’s gone missing. What complicates matters is the missing camper is the daughter of the (wealthy) founding family of the camp.

Liz Moore not only manages to produce a compelling plot, but she also displays some highly evocative language.

Here are my favourite examples:

• Her rather once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.
• She’s been Tessie Jo at the time, a frilly name, a name for a doll or a cow or some sort of entertainer, all wrong for such a stoic child.
• But on T.J., the [hair]cut seemed simply to indicate a lack of concern for early matters. It functioned, like a monk’s tonsure, to separate her from the laypeople at the camp.

[Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons by William He. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.]

Reading time: Less than 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Michael Crummey…

I’m not a fan of the way celebrated Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey plots his novels. Still, I really like the way he writes. I think my affection comes from the way he handles his figurative language.

In his book The Wreckage, which I wrote about three years ago, I disliked the plot while appreciating his imagery. And again, with his more recent book, The Innocents, I also found the plot (about an orphaned brother and sister in rural Newfoundland) off-putting, yet admired his poetic language — particularly his use of simile.

Here are my favourite examples: 

• But nothing apparent happened for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, the recurring contractions like knots in an endless string unwinding through the day.
• She had the air of a badly made doll stuffed with sawdust that had suddenly come to life.
• Whenever he happened to glance up at the tilt the bewildering enormity of what his sister was witnessing first-hand caught him unawares, like taking a gale of wind broadside to the boat as it cleared a point of land.
• The could feel the cold razoring off the frigid surface through the little clothes they wore and Ada shivered against it.
• He read periodically from the black book in his hands his voice like a spadeful of gravel against wood.
• But even days of stomach cramps and the bedevilment of diarrhea weren’t enough to make them swear off eating the dark fruit, their lips and teeth blackened like the mouths of ghouls in a medieval painting of hell.
• He was a smallish man and their mother just a skiver of bone and sinew, both of them tough as corded rope.
• Backed away like someone trying to exit a room without disturbing a sleeping dog.
• He took an elbow across the bridge of his nose and the shock of it made his head buzz like a a hive of bees.

[Photo credit: Katrina Afonso. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.]

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Oct. 31/19.

Reading time: Just over 2 minutes

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Claire Lombardo….

Claire Lombardo (pictured above), is a fiction writer, teacher, and 2017 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was released in June 2019 and debuted on the New York Times Bestseller list.

The Most Fun We Ever Had is an easy-to-read book with some fine figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:

• She followed Loomis to the study, and she paused before she entered, watching her husband’s back, the vulnerable fuzz on his neck, the hint of a bald spot spreading from the crown of his head like a galaxy.
• “I wanted to discuss my grade on the midterm paper.” She held it out like a summons.
• But she didn’t feel like Violet should be let off the hook quite so easily, sweeping in an out with the ease of a summer storm.
• Her defenses rose quickly, popped up like springs, and she pulled her hand away.
• And for a while he’d seemed to rally, as though the unexpected news were a potion she’d injected directly into his veins, and she began to wonder if it could possibly be this easy, if all it would take to get Ryan back to his old self was a big surprise, a little jolt, an ice pack to the amygdala.
• Their yard was immaculate, save for the ailing ginkgo tree, stationed in the center like a lighthouse.
• “Liza’s really pretty but she has the terrible color of hair that’s, like, not even a color? Ecru. Like a Band-Aid.”
• She propped herself up onto an elbow, cradling an arm around Wendy’s head, and he pushed himself up too, curving around their daughter a couple of protective apostrophes.
• His wife and daughters sniffed out potential weaknesses with acute drug-dog noises, suspicious, nurturing German shepherds who could spot his oncoming head colds or emotional fragility in a way that seemed almost superhuman.
• She held the anger back, stored it in the space behind her molars, biting down, every so often, and allowing herself to revel in the injustice.
• There was a nervy ache in her neck whose presence she was nursing like a plant, leaning into it and setting the soreness ablaze, feeding it all of her negative thoughts.

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Oct. 17/19.

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from James McBride….

I’ve been a dedicated reader since I was six years old. But if you backed me up against a wall and forced me to declare a favourite genre, I’d admit that I prefer memoir to just about anything else….

Earlier this year, The New York Times published a list of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 years. Of course, I had read many of them already. (My own faves? This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy.)

But many of the titles were new to me and I’ve been slowly reading my way through the list. The book, The Color of Water, by James McBride falls into this category.

A 1995 bestseller, The Color of Water describes the early life of American writer and musician James McBride.  One of 12 children, he grew up in a large, poor American-African family that was led by his white Jewish mother. McBride’s mother was strict and the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi.

But while the story itself is fascinating, it’s McBride’s figurative language that truly captured me. Here are my favourite examples:

• She rode so slowly that if you looked at her from a distance it seemed as if she weren’t moving, the image frozen, painted against the spring sky, a middle-aged white woman on an antique bicycle with black kids zipping past her on Sting-Ray bikes and skateboards, popping wheelies and throwing baseballs that whizzed past her head, tossing firecrackers that burst all around her.
• She was the commander in chief of my house because my stepfather did not live with us
• [She] ran a comb through my hair. The sensation was like a tractor pulling my curls off.
• It became the high point of my day, a memory so sweet it is burned into my mind like a tattoo.
• Mommy’s contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island.
• Every year the mighty bureaucratic dinosaur known as the New York City Public School System would belch forth a tiny diamond: they slipped a little notice to parents giving them the opportunity to have their kids bused to different school districts if they wanted.
• In summer she was the Pied Piper, leading the whole pack of us to public swimming pools, stripping down to her one-piece bathing suit and plunging into the water like a walrus, the rest of following her like seals, splashing and gurgling in terror behind her…

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Oct. 10/19.

[Photo credit: ©2013 Larry D. Moore. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.]