FAVORITE DESCRIPTIVE WRITING

Hi edgarblythe,

I love descriptive writing too. Jules Verne is one of my favourite authors, exquisite detail
As you are in 'Books', I take it that you are looking for passages which we like rather than we wrote ourselves. The art of descriptive writing sadly eludes me too. To capture beauty in words is a great gift!

Here is one of my favourite passages from 'The Diamond as Big as The Ritz', F Scott Fitzgerald -

"The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and outside the Montana night was bright as day. The tapestry brick of the road was smooth to the tread of the great tires as they rounded a still, moonlit lake; they passed into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn and John's exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous with Percy's taciturn "We're home."

Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite chateau rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland--and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had ever heard before. Then in a moment the car stopped before wide, high marble steps around which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.

"Mother," Percy was saying, "this is my friend, John Unger, from Hades."

Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze of many colors, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces. There was a whitehaired man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania with braided sapphires in her hair. There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception of the ultimate prism--ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until, lit with tall violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish or dream.

Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes the floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from lighting below, patterns of barbaric clashing colors, of pastel delicacy, of sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of every texture and color or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct before the age of man. . . . "

To read the whole story online http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/diamond/diamond.html

Fitzgerald is one of the best descriptive writers. Also excellent is Raymond Chandler, especially when his detective Marlowe is paying a visit to a rich client.

But probably the greatest descriptive writer of all time is Marcel Proust. He can spend a page of descriptive metaphor evoking the sight, smell, or taste of an object, a face, or a memory--and gets it brilliantly right every time.

larry, thanks for the recommendation : Proust is now on my 'To Read' list

Any time, Think Zinc.

I was mesmerized by Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." Delicious. You just want to eat it up with a spoon.

Thank you. I have been preoccupied away from my PC for a few days, but I do appreciate your contributions.

Victor Hugo...The Hunchback of Notre Dame is my favorite book. Unfortunately, there are times when his descriptive detail is a bit too much.