Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Sigrid Nunez….
Sigrid Nunez, pictured above, was only a moderately successful American fiction writer until she won the 2018 US National Book Award for Fiction for her seventh novel, The Friend.
I enjoyed that book a great deal, and when my husband recently discovered an earlier book by Nunez at our library, I happily took it off his hands.
Nunez wrote The Last of Her Kind. in 2006, and it follows the friendship between two women from wildly different backgrounds who meet as roommates at Barnard College during the 1960s. Nunez said that she wanted to write about the era through the eyes of “specific individuals who happened to come of age in that revolutionary time.”
- On one of Nicole’s office bookshelves, on a small tray, sat a frighteningly fragile tea set — cups so thin you would have thought the tea would seep right through.
- This was all part of it, their intimacy a thing that could be sensed, warming the room like the steam coming off the rice, sweetening the air, like the curry and the pipe tobacco.
- I was not ready to talk, but I was able at last to stir from that chair, to move about gingerly on legs that felt as if I had borrowed them from someone taller.
- For the next hour or so, just about everything would strike us as hilarious, and tomorrow our stomachs would hurt as if we had done hundreds of sit-ups.
- The day after I arrived, in the evening, a storm blew up. A serious storm, a storm with claws: I thought they’d pry that little cottage apart.
