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 metaphors from Cathleen Schine….
I learned about Cathleen Schine’s 2019 novel in an interview — not with her, but with author Gish Jen — published in the New York Times.
Here is what Jen said: “Cathleen Schine’s brilliant novel, The Grammarians, is to die for. To behold a grammatical descriptivist at war with a grammatical prescriptivist who happens to be her twin is truly an uncommon pleasure.”
Imagine my delight when I learned that one of the main characters was a copy editor named Daphne!
The book is marvellous — funny and affecting and with a charming and distinctive voice. Here are my favourite examples showing Schine’s skill with figurative language:
- They played with the words as if they were toys, mental toys, lining them up, changing their order, and involving them in intrigues of love and friendship and bitter enmity.
- The girls would stand on their chairs and chant numbers until Arthur pushed his chair back with a crash and chased them from the room, their shrieks of laughter trailing like colorful scarves.
- The stove was so old it looked like something from a silent movie.
- Whenever the wind blew outside, Laurel and Daphne could hear it whistling — like a phantom looking for its phantom dog, Laurel said.
- The room was the same color as the hallway. It had a hollow, chalky smell, the smell of abandonment, like a classroom after school has let out.
- The little girl with the hair that surely harbored a large bird of prey gave her an astonished look.
- Laurel looked away, pullet at her wet silk sleeve. She watched it peel off her arm, translucent, just like the peeling skin of sunburns long ago.
- Like a Galapagos tortoise, he had no need to pay attention. He had no predators. He was protected by an expansive carapace of good nature, money, and family status.
- Daphne was at the kitchen table typing Bent over like a nineteenth-century clerk. There was no self-consciousness, there couldn’t be, there was too much concentration, two fingers, tapping fast, noisy as woodpeckers.
- She brushed his scanty hair as if he were a huge doll.
- It did not take Laurel long to adjust to [teaching] sixth grade. The old, pleasant feeling of Teacher had washed over her as soon as she walked into the classroom: she was a shepherd, a sheepdog, a shrink, a referee, a prophet, a friend.
