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Snow!

Started by Twit 2, March 01, 2018, 06:52:22 PM

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Twit 2

Post yer favourite snow themed bits of lit, then.

Obvious, but also as good as prose gets in English, the ending of James Joyce's short story 'The Dead':

QuoteGenerous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I'd also recommend Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, which along with JA Baker's The Peregrine is the best nature book I've ever read.

newbridge

Tolstoy's early short story, "The Snowstorm," has a great description of getting lost in a blizzard.

There tends to be a lot about that sort of thing in Russian literature.  Pushkin has a short story in one of his 'Tales Of The Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin', called 'The Snowstorm', where a man gets lost in a snowy wilderness after a snowstorm when he's rushing on his way to his wedding in an elopement.  He also wrote a novel, 'The Captain's Daughter', set during the Pugachev rebellion of 1772 - 75, where the character narrating it gets stranded in a remote part of Russia in the snow and wind while travelling to his army outpost, and at the same time meets a character who plays a pivotal role later in the story.

Oops! Wrong Planet

QuoteMoney was scarce, and Sonja learned to make wonderful dishes out of snow.
'What's for dessert?'
'A surprise, Boris.'
'Yes? What?'
'A nice big bowl of sleet.'

mr beepbap

'Blind Cunt' by Irvine Welsh

Howj Begg

Quote from: newbridge on March 02, 2018, 12:18:11 AM
Tolstoy's early short story, "The Snowstorm," has a great description of getting lost in a blizzard.

Quote from: Alternative Carpark on March 02, 2018, 12:29:39 PM
There tends to be a lot about that sort of thing in Russian literature.  Pushkin has a short story in one of his 'Tales Of The Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin', called 'The Snowstorm', where a man gets lost in a snowy wilderness after a snowstorm when he's rushing on his way to his wedding in an elopement.  He also wrote a novel, 'The Captain's Daughter', set during the Pugachev rebellion of 1772 - 75, where the character narrating it gets stranded in a remote part of Russia in the snow and wind while travelling to his army outpost, and at the same time meets a character who plays a pivotal role later in the story.

Gogol's The Overcoat too, which... difficult to reveal without spoiling, but it's memorable.

Q

'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost.

QuoteWhose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound's the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

I also think particularly of the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, whom Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, and W. G. Sebald has written about. His Christmas story 'Rock Crystal' has some very polished and elegant descriptions of two children, brother and sister, trekking across a mountain and getting hopelessly lost in a snowstorm. It's an extraordinary novella, which can be read on one level as a quiet and suspenseful folktale and as an unusual meditation on the relation of humankind to places and to nature on quite another.

QuoteAs far as the eye could reach there was only ice. Pointed masses and irregular clumps thrusting up from the fearsome snow-encrusted ice. Instead of a barricade that could be surmounted, with snow beyond, as they had expected, yet other walls of ice rose from the buttress, cracked and fissured, with innumerable meandering blue veins, and beyond these walls, others like them; and beyond, others, until the falling snow blurred the distance in its veil of gray.