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.]
