Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from Nell Stevens…
I’m not a fan of ghost stories. But I appreciate well-written historical fiction. And I also like the writing of Nell Stevens.
Her most recent novel, A Delicious Life, tells the story of the relationship between Frédéric Chopin and George Sand.
In this book, the main character is a ghost. She is Blanca, a young woman who died in 1473 at 14, and who “lives” in the 19th-century village where Chopin and Sand are spending time.
A Delicious Life is an easy read, although not as skillful as my favourite of Stevens’ books: Bleaker House, a memoir that tells the story of her serious case of writer’s block.
Earlier writing problems notwithstanding, Stevens has a deft eye and ear for figurative language. Here are my favourite examples from her most recent work:
- He extended a deliberate finger and depressed [a piano key]. The sound it emitted was jangling: a bird’s disturbed shriek. He stepped back as though burned.
- His fingers twitched at the sight of the keys, hands hovering like hummingbirds.
- There is a smell of damp throughout and smoke from the stove. The walls are egg-yolk yellow, which makes the faces of the children look sallow and unwell.
- Scraped and dented, the wall looks like a musical score, crisscrossed with fine lines.
- [There was] coughing, so much coughing, which made his organs feel rearranged, strong enough to bring up spots of blood like a scattering of musical notes across his handkerchief.
- He persevered nonetheless, hands clustered together on the lower half of the keyboard, feeling their way over the black keys like crabs across rocks.
- The dresses got spattered in mud thrown up by vehicles in the street; the shoes wilted off her feet like dying flowers; the headwear was impossible from the start.
- Thunder was rolling down off the mountain like punches. The pain of the thunder was the pain of a full-body blow.
- It’s January and the weather is freezing, but it’s clammy inside. Everyone is pink-nosed, rubbing their hands together, and the women are fanning themselves unnecessarily, which gives George the impression of being in an aviary, surrounded by wings.
