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 Noah Hawley….
I don’t typically read murder mysteries but when my friend Carlos Chavez recommend such a title a few days before I was about to go on holiday, I decided to succumb.
Before the Fall by producer, screenwriter, and bestselling author Noah Hawley (pictured above) is a book that moves at the speedy clip perfect for plane rides or time on the beach.
(You may know Hawley as the creator and writer of the following TV series: FX, Fargo and Legion . Earlier, he worked on Bones, The Unusuals and My Generation.)
In addition to knowing how to stick-handle plot, Hawley also has a deft eye and ear for figurative language. Here are my favourite examples from Before the Fall.
- San Francisco was foggy and cold that weekend, wide avenues rolling like tongue tricks down to the water.
- The shoulder is dislocated, not broken. The procedure to pop it back into place is an epic lightning strike of violence followed immediately by a cessation of pain so intense it’s as if the damage has been erased from his body retroactively.
- It is a space of pure white — white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white furniture — as if he has died and moved on to some kind of heavenly limbo.
- On days when the temperature was over 90 she might buy a shaved ice from a Mexican man with a cart — usually cherry — and sit in the grass eating it with the flat thumbnail of a tiny spoon.
- Maggie shook her head, shock calming her, making her limbs feel like seaweed floating on the waves.
- The house is small and hidden by trees. There is a port leading to it, as if the wide-plank slats on the left end of the building have given up over the years, slumping from exhaustion or boredom or both.
[Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Cropped. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.]
