Mugtoe
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Registered: Oct 2001
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Eudora Welty - Losing Battles
The cover of this book put me off - don't even say it. I just finished a collection of essays of southern literary criticism specifically concerning Texas literature called "Range Wars", and she was mentioned in it several times as being a significant southern writer. So my interest was sparked.
Two dozen pages into this book, and every page is simply amazing to me. Here are a couple of short passages among pages where every paragraph is as good as these.
quote:
Distance had already vanished in the haze of heat, but the passageway down which they had just gone was bright as the eye of a needle. The other end was sky. The house was just what it seemed, two in one. The second house had been build side by side with the original – all a long time ago – and the space between the two had been floored over and roofed but not to this day closed in. The passage, in which Granny’s old loom could stand respected and not be in the way, was wider than the rooms on either side. The logs had been chinked tight with clay and limestone, in placed faced with cedar board, now weathered almost pink. Chimneys rose from the side at either end. The galleries ran the full width of the house back and front, and under the roof’s low swing, the six slender posts along the front stood hewn four-square and even-spaced by rule of a true eye. Pegs in the wood showed square as thumbnails along the seams; in the posts, the heart-grain rose to the touch. The makings of the house had never been hidden to the Mississippi air, which was now, this first Sunday in August, and at this hour, still soft as milk.
This is just good solid writing, imo.
quote:
Gloria sat down in front of them all on the top step, a long board limber as leather and warmer than the skin, her starch-whitened high-heeled shoes on the mountain stone that was the bottom step. In four yards of organdy that with scratching sounds like frolicking mice, covered all three steps, she sat with her chin in her hand, her head ablaze. The red-gold hair, a cloud almost as big around as the top of an organ stool, nearly hid what they could peep at and see of her big hazel eyes. For a space about the size of a biscuit around the small, bony points of her elbows, there were no freckles; the inner sides of her arms, too, were snowy. But everywhere else, every other visible inch of her skin, even to her ears was freckled as if she'd been sprinkled with nutmeg while she was still dewy and it would never brush off.
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11-21-2003 10:12 PM
