Gorgeous Words: Tan Twan Eng & “The Garden of Evening Mists”
On Monday, when reporting back to you on my read of Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), I mentioned that the writing was beautiful and subtle.
In other words, the book is full of gorgeous words. Here’s small sample, to add to Monday’s post:
“In the shallows, a grey heron cocked its head at me, one leg poised in the air, like the hand of a pianist who has forgotten the notes to his music. It dropped the leg a second later and speared its beak into the water. … I knew it could not be the same bird from nearly forty years before but, as I watched it, I hoped that it was; I wanted to believe that by entering this sanctuary the heron had somehow managed to slip through the fingers of time.
To my right and at the top of an incline stood Aritomo’s house. Light shone from the windows, the kitchen chimney scribbling smoke over the treetops. A man appeared at the front door and walked down the slope towards me. He stopped a few paces away, perhaps to create a space for us to study one another. We are like every single plant and stone and view in the garden, I thought, the distance between one another carefully measured.”
It’s not just the gorgeous words on their own, it’s the way the author puts them together. A big part of my love of reading and writing is appreciating that art.