Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes from Alexander Chee…
Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer. He spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Chee’s critically acclaimed debut novel Edinburgh won the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and the Michener/Copernicus Fellowship Prize.
The story, which focuses on the sexual abuse of young boys, is a difficult read, but Chee is a masterful writer. I found his use of figurative language to be particularly adept. Here are my favourite examples:
- The summer air [is] like a wet towel on my back.
- The currents spill softly around me. The water has the milky freshwater taste of having come through granite, which is why it is so clear here. The sun above turns flat and silver like a dropped coin.
- His pale hair blows up off his head, as if his real mother were a dandelion gone to seed.
- He was as pale as a mushroom.
- Soon the clocks will go forward, the nights shrink close like turtleneck collars.
- A woman’s voice is different, so very different and hers, ridged by vibrato, cuts like a serrated blade, where we boys stab like swords — our voices tremble not at all.
- When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest.
- Winter break cones like an open grave in winter, a dark cold slot after the fall term’s last snowy days.
- The sky looks full of comets and the crescent moon is a little pink on the top, like it cut someone before rising.
- She’s a pretty girl, Irish skin and the blue eyes like the sky reflected in a sword.
[Photo credit: ©2018 Larry D. Moore. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.]
