Delicious descriptions

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Nam Le on a storm

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Australia is not all surf, sand and sea, as much as the tourist industry likes to have it so. We actually do have “weather”, as many quaintly call anything that is not fine, sunny and calm. It is, in fact, autumn here now … after a rather unusual summer (in most parts of the country). It wasn’t as hot, and we had a lot more rain than the average. There have been, in different parts of the country, fires, floods and cyclones, all wreaking their own special form of damage, so I thought it was time for a description that wasn’t sun. What about storms?

Storms in literature, of course, usually have a symbolic as well as literal function, and this is the case in Nam Le‘s story “Halfhead Bay”. Storms can reflect strong emotions or conflict, herald a disturbance, suggest chaos or violence, and/or imply divine intervention. In King Lear, for example, the storm reflects his growing madness and, as is generally regarded, signposts divine intervention. But, symbols like that are most effective when they work well on the literal level first. King Lear feels the power of the actual storm as we readers see its import. Nam Le’s storm, too, is visceral:

And she was right, the storm was coming in – it was streaking like a grey mouth snarled with wind, like a shredded howl, rendering the land into a dark, unchartered coast. The bay turning black. For centuries, fleets had broken themselves against the teeth of that coast.

It’s not unusual to personify storms … but this one here is particularly powerful, not to mention rather malevolent sounding.  Some storms can be powerful in a beautiful way. This, however, is not one of them.

Note: I read Nam Le’s award-winning short story collection, The boat, a couple of months before I started blogging, so you won’t have seen a review here. It’s an astonishingly versatile collection and well worth reading.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Albert Camus on the sun

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As I’m an Australian litblogger, I intend my Delicious Descriptions from Down Under to be primarily of Down Under. However, as we in the southern hemisphere come to the end of summer, as my first two Delicious Descriptions were on the sun and, as I am re-reading Albert Camus‘ The plague, I can’t resist sharing a Camus description of the sun.

Frowning Sun

Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com

Here he is on Oran:

… summer blazed out above the house-tops. First a strong, scorching wind blew steadily for a whole day, drying up the walls. And then the sun took charge, incessant waves of heat and light swept the town daylong, and but for arcaded streets and the interiors of houses, everything lay naked to the dazzling impact of the light. The sun stalked our townsfolk along every byway, into every nook, and when they paused it struck.

This is Camus … so the sun has more than a literal role in this novel. But, at the literal level, I will simply add that I know that Australia is not the only “sunburnt place” in the world. And this, I think, is an effective description of another sunburnt place.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Marjorie Barnard on the sun and heat

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Marjorie Barnard

Marjorie Barnard (Courtesy: State Library of New South Wales, via Wikipedia)

My first Delicious descriptions post was from Barbara Hanrahan on the sun in Adelaide, so I thought we might travel to Sydney for this one. As it’s still in summer in our neck of the woods, here is Marjorie Barnard in The persimmon tree and other stories (1943), also on the sun – and its enervating effect:

In the wealthy suburbs of the North Shore and Vaucluse a change had taken place too. It was as if the earth had been squeezed so that all the fine houses that had nestled so comfortably in the contours and in the greenery, were forced up to the light. They bulged out, exposed, and the sun tore at them. The gardens that had embowered them were perished. Tinder dry, fire had been through many of them, scorching walls and blistering away any paint that remained. Most of these houses were empty or inhabited as if they were caves, by people who had come in from the stricken country. The owners had fled, not so much from present hardship, as from the nebulous threat of the future, the sense of being trapped in a doomed city. The shores of the harbour were lion-coloured or drab grey. Sandhills showed a vivid whiteness. Only the water was alive and brilliant. And it was salt. (from “Dry spell”)

I like her point that nature doesn’t discriminate (even though we know that, in reality, the well-off do often have the wherewithal to avoid its worst effects). And I love the last sentence – the short finality of it.

POSTSCRIPTS:

  1. I have been at the coast this week, and so scheduled my first two Delicious Descriptions for this time. I promise I won’t be bombarding you bi-weekly with these. (The dictionaries are confused! I looked up “bi-weekly” and it can mean both “twice a week”, as I mean here, of course, and “every two weeks”. How silly is that! Anyhow, perhaps “semiweekly” is the preferable term.)
  2. And Sarah (you Devoted Reader you), this one’s for you. May you experience no more such heat in Sydney this summer.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Barbara Hanrahan on the sun

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When you read do you come across passages that you just want to hang onto forever – but (if you’re a blogger) when you go to write your blog review you can’t quite make them fit? I do, and have been pondering for some time what to do about it. Then, suddenly, it came to me. How about a series of posts comprising favourite bits from books (and other writing)? And so, “Delicious descriptions from Down Under” was born. The posts will be occasional – and some times more occasional than others – but I’ll just see where it takes me.

For my first one, I couldn’t go past Barbara Hanrahan‘s The scent of eucalyptus (1973) which I reviewed recently. It’s full of “delicious descriptions” but the one I wanted to share has to do with the Sun, with, specifically, hot sunny days in the city of Adelaide. I was in Adelaide on a scorchingly hot long January weekend many moons ago, and haven’t forgotten it. Here is Hanrahan:

Myilly Point, Darwin, shutters

Shutters

The sun is everywhere.

It is in the garden: peering huge-eyed over the berry bush, roosting behind the chimney, floating like a fried egg in puddles. It mocks me when I burn my bare feet on the earth and scorch my fingers on the iron fence. It peels my nose to jigsaw puzzles, gilds my skin with freckles, turns the hair on my arms to gold.

It is in the house: spangling the passage with leopard spots, turning the sheepskin rug tawny, casting zebra stripes through the shutters. It curdles the milk, melts the butter, shows the dust, fades the curtains. It steals into vases and drinks their water; creeps up the cold tap and turns it hot.

Such intense summer heat that goes on for days is typically – though not solely I know – Australian. I love the way she gives the sun life, the way she mixes up her imagery and yet consciously but not rigidly uses a symmetrical structure to make it read more like poetry than prose. It works beautifully – for me, anyhow.