What imagery sticks in your mind from books you have read? What makes you think, ‘damn that would make an amazing visual in a movie’ or just sticks in your mind.
Science-fiction is good for this, I recently read ‘Red Mars’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, and while I found the book pretty slow going the payoff at the end is worth it. The particular passage I’m thinking of is when the rebels/terrorists/freedom fighters bomb the recently completed orbital elevator and the cables drop to the surface of Mars impacting at orbital velocities and with increasing violence as the cable shortens. It is stated that the cable will almost circle the planet twice and for those on the ground near the impact site the cable coming down is visible as a blinding white stripe crossing from horizon to horizon in less than a second, completely destroying everything for miles around, and that no one close enough to actually see the impact of the last thousand miles of cable survived to tell the tale with the impact being so violent that even remote cameras were quickly destroyed. :eek:
A second example I recall was taken from the journal of an officer observing British troops going ‘over the top’ in a battle during the first world war (the Somme I believe), the officer stated that the machine gun fire was so heavy that the men were leaning into it as they advanced, as if into a storm.
Ringworld had quite a few moments like that. The encounter with the “eye storm” comes to mind; suddenly they are flying into a vast mass of swirling clouds that appears to be looking at them.
I wish I could remember the book I read this in, but I happen to remember the turn of phrase as a particularly nasty young lady being described by “she smiled like a zipper”.
In D.F.W.'s “Good Old Neon,” the narrator (who you find out very early in the story has committed suicide) is describing the happiest period of his life. It’s not so much a single moment, but a collage of very particular images and sensations from his youth, when he was an amateur baseball player in the American Legion; e.g., the vibrations of the bat into his hands after hitting the ball, the smell of the spring grass, running around the bases, etc. There’s a sensuous description of a ton of minor details, and the joy it gave him when he was young, and of later in his teen years, when he began to worry about statistics and errors and whether or not he was good. And eventually, he began to worry about it so much that it no longer made him happy.
Anyway, punctuating this long description, he finishes by saying that well into an uninspired and anxiety-fraught adulthood, he imagined that, “…sometimes it felt like I was actually asleep and none of this was even real and that someday out of nowhere I was going to maybe wake up in midstride.”
It comes at the perfect moment in the text. I was so bowled over by the entire thing that I had to put the book down and pace around the room, contemplating what I thought was a seriously impressive emotional achievement by D.F.W.
Roger Zelazny was always good at this sort of thing. In the Chronicles of Amber, one of the protagonists’ sisters, a very dangerous woman, is described as having “a Mona Lisa machine gun smile.”
I read George Orwell’s “1984” when I was 25. The story was getting kind of dull and I was getting a little bored, just reading so I could finish the book when all of a sudden one line scared the shit out of me so much I had to actually put the book down, walk away from it and come back later:
Winston says “We are the dead”, Julia says “We are the dead”, then:
"You are the dead." Said the voice behind the painting.
The whole store is a build up to the total destruction of planet earth. Not just the surface life, total physical anihilation of the physical planet.
It’s such a long buildup that I kept hoping he wouldn’t wimp out on the final destruction scene. I wanted him to actually describe it, not just “and then Earth was totally destroyed”.
He came through. There is a scene where two people sit on a hilltop in Yosemite and watch the destruction roll towards them. I was satisfied.
Detailed, eloquent and, on moments, very poetic description of lady’s hands that a main protagonist is visiting to be presented with an interesting scheme. He figured pretty quickly what she wants and stops listening to her and starts looking at her; being aware of who she is (wife of a local judge) he finds looking at her hands least offensive. Also, it was a brilliant work of foreshadowing of things to come and the imagery that was registered very early in the novel paid well in the later part of the plot.
The novel is Mehmed Mesa Selimovic’s “Dervish and Death”– the most famous and most important work of literature in Bosnian history. Sheikh Ahmed Nuruddin is a dervish during ottoman occupation of Bosnia who is forced to make moral compromises in order to save his brother from mysterious charges. An opportunity arises when the mentioned lady asks to meet him on a unrelated matter and Ahmed contemplates quid pro quo type of a deal with the said woman not realizing that his attention to her hands will undermine his resolve to save brother as any reader will deduce that. At that point, this woman has, albeit small and initially almost insignificant, hold over his thoughts and actions as any God’s beautiful female creature has over a man.
The novel is written as a stream of consciousness i.e. in 1st person POV.
The following intro depicts a state of his mind as he sits down across from her – he’s pretty much “scared” of her (he is 40):
Needless to say, (warning: highly subjective claim coming… ) every paragraph in this novel is as beautiful as this one . I do realize however, it would not make an interesting movie visual in OP sense but in the novel it has its mark.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard writes: “The rain pocked the water.”
To me, if she’d left off the first article “The” (unnecessary and drags down the immediacy) it would be the perfect sentence. Concise and image provoking. I see rain pelting the surface of a lake.
Or big drops plopping into a swimming pool.
Or scumy, irridescent star bursts (what’s the word for what happens when you drop water into oil and it’s “repelled?”) in a gutter.
Oh, yeah. The various hellrides though alternate realities, many of the odd Shadows, the underwater fight on the stairs to Remba with blood floating away in the water; one that really stuck in my head was Benedict finally catching up to Corwin and the fight that followed.
I remember very little about Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, but I will never forget the passage in which a character gets his leg trapped in a slowly rising river and drowns.
