5 Beautiful Passages from Books

We have done quite a few parts to this already but, by popular demand, it has come back once again. Having already covered the following books in the previous sections: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Just Above My Head by James Baldwin. (Takes a long exhaling breath).

In this section we are going to cover a lot more books that have a certain amount of beauty to them, they are somewhat written as if they will always be timeless and you know how much I love beautifully written books. So, welcome to part four! Again, these are in no particular order.

5 Beautiful Passages from Books (Pt.4)

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

“I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain’s surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized..."

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner is one of my all-time favourite novels. About the dissilussion of the south, this collapse of the American Dream is much darker than any Jay Gatsby you'll read about. It's more like a tough mix between the landscape of Huckleberry Finn with the brooding tyranny of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. The book is a mind-blowing work of Southern Gothic genius and will live on long after everyone we know is dead.

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

“The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.”

When I was about 16-18, I was absolutely obsessed with 'Less Than Zero', I just adored that book so much, there was no other way of explaining it. There was something about it that kept drawing me back to it - from the strange paragraph about people in L.A being afraid to merge on the freeway all the way through to the monsters that have become of Clay's friends - and later, in the follow-up Imperial Bedrooms, of himself. I don't think people who have only seen the movie or heard about the book really realise how disturbing the events of the novel actually are. The book is a work of transgressive, self-destructive genius.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”

I used this book and some others for my undergraduate dissertation and honestly, it has always fascinated me ever since I was fifteen and made an attempt to read it. It was an arduous process back then but now, it is far more enjoyable and yet, I still find myself becoming almost frightened by some of the imagery of the inferno. The way in which atmosphere is a huge part of this book should mean that if you read it properly, it will send shivers down you. Well, until you get to paradiso, that is far more grand and the atmosphere is not as dark and horrific. But let's all face it, the inferno will always be associated with Dante more than any of the other two parts - more than the concept of the inferno itself.

Kafka was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

This is quite possibly one of my favourite books of all time, I read it on the way to a university trip on a coach from cover to cover - when I looked up as I finished it my lecturer asked me if the book was good and I said that it was brilliant. Over time, my copy has become littered with notes and highlighting, stuff that I did when I did an essay on the literature of American Urbanisation and compared this book with "Huckleberry Finn" because of the time difference of the Civil War and World War 2. I've also marked out quotations that I enjoy and labelled it with ideas I've had about the books various extended metaphors. It makes me sad that more people haven't read it and I for the life of me, can't remember how I found it. But when you do read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

“I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.”

My favourite Nabakov novel is "Invitation to a Beheading" and honestly it is one of the most morally fascinating novels I have ever read. Filled with deception, trickery and dishonesty - it is one of Nabokov's most flamboyant and yet, also one of his darkest novels. About a man who is going to be executed, it leads up to his dark day with the strange enormities of life and death and all the philosophies that come with them. I've read it a couple of times and every time I have adored it.

Conclusion

These are five lovely books that I have spent a lot of time pining over and I hope they have the same impact on you as you discover them too.