Dragging his fear like a cart behind him…

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 and similes from Anthony Doerr.

One of my favourite books of the last five years, the novel All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (pictured above), is so thoroughly chockfull of figurative language that I had to stop to make notes every page or so.

A Pulitizer Prize winner, this novel was both warm and charming, equally happy and sad. I haven’t been so moved by a book in many years. Here are some of my favourite bits of the figurative language it possessed:

  • He sees a forest of dying sunflowers. He sees a flock of blackbirds explode out of a tree.
  • Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.
  • Men brawl over jobs outside the Zollverein gates, and chicken eggs sell for two million reichsmarks apiece, and rheumatic fever stalks Children’s House like a wolf.
  • The locksmith reties the stone inside the bag and slips it back into his rucksack. He can feel its tiny weight there, as though he has slipped it inside his own mind: a knot.
  • He wakes to see the silhouette of an airplane blot stars as it hurtles east. It makes a soft tearing sound as it passes overhead. Then it disappears. The ground concusses a moment later.
  • In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.
  • The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, cover rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke.
  • He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.
  • The warrant officer in charge of field exercises is the commandant, an overzealous schoolmaster named Bastian with an expansive walk and a round belly and a coat quivering with war medals.
  • The canopies of cherry trees drift overhead, pregnant with blossoms.
  • Levitte the perfumer is flabby and plump, basted in his own self-importance.
  • She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.
  • Then he turns and recedes down the street, dragging his fear like a cart behind him.
  • That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth.
  • Memories cartwheel out of her head and tumble across the floor.
  • People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges.
  • His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.
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