Word: prose
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That power is visible on nearly every page of Paradise. Morrison's prose remains the marvel that it was in her earlier novels, a melange of high literary rhetoric and plain talk. She can turn pecan shelling into poetry: "the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl, cooking utensils in eternal adjustment, insect whisper, the argue of long grass, the faraway cough of cornstalks." She captures the stark geography surrounding Ruby: "This land is flat as a hoof, open as a baby's mouth." And she builds Ruby practically brick by brick: its streets (named after the four Gospels...
...they come to pin the blame for this disruption on the strange women in the Convent is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power. Morrison once wrote a Cornell master's thesis on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and the Mississippian's incantatory prose rhythms still crop up in her writing. Here is Deacon musing on the past as he drives around in Ruby: "He [Deacon's grandfather] would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could...
...James, the guilty pleasure of the British, tries her hardest to put a cerebral veil over her shamefully entertaining prose. Well-practiced in her deception, James takes typical whodunits and wraps them in eloquent, flowing language. At times, she almost convinces you--gasp!--that a thriller is of literary value...
...Certain Justice is most enjoyable because of its deliciously subversive literary flair. James' prose is eloquent and yet strikingly lucid. The opening line of the novel, "Murders do not usually give their victims notice," is the perfect segway into a haunting exploration of Venetia Aldrige's character. The well-practiced virtuoso quality in A Certain Justice draws you into its foreboding atmosphere: "Has it ever occurred to you that a woman, when she is powerful, is more powerful than a man?" asks one of the suspects. The flowing prose often reaches its own stylistic climaxes, independent of plot events...
Even when Holub strays outside his boundaries, his writing remains quick and poetic. A team of six translators (including Holub himself) collaborated on Shedding Life, and they succeed admirably in capturing the terse, aphoristic quality of his prose. For instance, Holub likens the Vietnamese minipig, the Eastern bloc's lab animal of choice, to "a semibald porcupine caught in a frontal collision between two armored cars...