I blogged last week about how hard it is to write sex scenes without being unintentionally ridiculous (and the target of intentional ridiculousness is maybe even harder to hit).
I would never mock bad fan fiction, springing as it does from the pure hearts but poor fiction-writing skills of writers like me.
But published novels, that's another thing.
I just came across this scene in a Published Book that made me crow with delight at the… the "freshness", shall we say, of its metaphors.
This is the passage; the speaker is a young man having sex with a young woman [A]:
Oh, myyyy. Nothing like that post-lift–off cheetah breath.
I would never mock bad fan fiction, springing as it does from the pure hearts but poor fiction-writing skills of writers like me.
But published novels, that's another thing.
I just came across this scene in a Published Book that made me crow with delight at the… the "freshness", shall we say, of its metaphors.
This is the passage; the speaker is a young man having sex with a young woman [A]:
"For most people, sex was an end in itself. For me, it was a vehicle. The perfect vehicle. A slow-burning rocket headed toward the white well of infinity, with flames hot enough to torch my memories and acceleration strong enough to life me off a barren blasted earth and point me toward the possibility of paradise. The longer the journey, the longer the flames burned, the better it was. If I could have made it last forever, if I could go and never come back, if I could be incinerated, that would be best.
At some point, [A] fell away from me like a spent booster rocket. …We were tangled up together in my bed, panting into each other's faces like a pair of cheetahs at the end of a kill sprint…"
Oh, myyyy. Nothing like that post-lift–off cheetah breath.
Wow. Nothing as bitter as a poorly mixed metaphor.
ReplyDeletePlus what really impresses me here is that each metaphor *on its own* is sort of brilliantly weird!
ReplyDeleteIt feels like there should be yellow CAUTION tape around those sentences. Yikes.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun to find the novel via the excerpt and read reviews. Yes, what a well-crafted, eloquent novel. My eye!
I know! The book jacket had reputable looking review quotes on it. But the whole book (well, what I skimmed of it) was full of this Space Safari kind of stuff. (Pretty impressive actually, in its way.)
ReplyDeleteOh, god. Reminds me of Tolkien going on about how moss grows on trees. Everyone knows and no one cares and did you really go with rockets and cheetahs and infinity? Shaddup!
ReplyDelete"The moss was like a cheetah running up the bark on a rocket to infinity."
ReplyDelete- J.R.R. Tolkien
Marz: You're even righter than you know---I used an initial for the woman's name, but it's Arwen.
ReplyDeleteYep, the panting cheetah booster rocket is an elf from Tolkein.
Well, the outlandish metaphor is arguably kind of Chandleresque.
ReplyDeleteSPARKER: I love Chandler, and I can never figure out what's going on in his writing either! But believe me, the whole book does not maintain this level of excellent bafflement.
ReplyDelete