Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from Rachel Kushner….
Rachel Kushner is an American writer, currently living in Los Angeles. Her fourth and most recent novel (2024), Creation Lake, was long-listed for the National Book Award for fiction and short-listed for the Booker Prize.
While I found the story — about a freelance spy who works to undermine environmental activists — to be both frustrating and not as interesting as it should have been, I found Kushner’s writing to be remarkable.
Kushner has an acute eye and ear for both simile and metaphor. Here are my favourite examples from her book:
- The air was damp and warm and close, like human breath.
- The rain had left enormous puddles that were the tint of milk chocolate, their surface silk-screened in sky.
- The hills above Vantôme were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition.
- I was driving with an animal liberation activist in my passenger seat, a freckle boy aged twenty-three with a fringe of fluffy read beard-hair attached to his jawline like drapery tassel.
- Lucien and I took the TGV from Gare de Lyon to Marseille, riding backward in a swaying first-class train car a canister of modern French technology tearing through French countryside at three hundred kilometers an hour, farmers and rolling hills and little medieval villages being pulled backward as if by a monster vacuum cleaner was sucking the landscape into its unseen mouth.
- Platon also berated his assigned driver, an older man with a jaundiced complexion and hooded eyes that were the blue of mentholated cough drops.
- A woman with platinum upswept hair and diamond earrings sat eating French fries, daubing each slender fry in ketchup as if dipping a sable brush into a dollop of red paint.
- The rosé was delicate and fruity, crisp as ironed linen.
- It [a heron] took sideways steps, its large beak like gardening shears holding the gopher.
- As I walked, the high sun illuminated uncanny colors in the limestone, colors so vibrant and bright they looked artificial. Some areas were lavender but patterned with lichen that was gold-bright, like ground turmeric. Other lichens were creamy white and stretched along the rock face like embroidery.
