Writers often focus on visuals, but some of the most powerful moments come from senses we cannot see.
I remember reading Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. The way Süskind described scents was so vivid that I could almost smell them. The description of the tannery where Grenouille worked, the stink of animal hides, blood, and sweat mixed together, was so intense that I could almost smell it. It made me feel both disgusted and amazed at how powerful the writing was.
Another example is in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, when the Hogwarts feast is described with roast chicken, sausages, treacle tart, and pumpkin juice. Reading it as a kid made me crave food I had never even tasted before, and that feeling stayed with me.
And in The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the silence of the empty, burned out world was described as barren and dead to the point that it made me hear nothingness. It was chilling, like silence itself was a sound.
These details stayed with me long after finishing the books.
I wonder which sensory detail from a book stuck with you long after reading, a smell, a taste, or a sound that you could almost experience yourself?
Thank you.
by gamersecret2
5 Comments
The Yellow Wallpaper… the color, the smell, the look, the feeling, all of it!
Oh man, the descriptions of the feasts in Brian Jacques’s Redwall books still stick with me 15 years later. I think at one point they made a Redwall cookbook but I feel like part of the magic is their setting in the world he created, not just the actual dishes.
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Unrelated: Sight.
I was blown away with how Jose Saramago described the blindness in his 1995 book.
Quite short description of nothingness, but white like thick fog. It was hard to imagine at first, seeing whiteness when you close your eyes, but then it never left me.
It’s been years since I read it, but in the book “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury, there are descriptions of the sound of autumn leaves blowing down a dark street that took on an eerie role, almost like another character. I’ve never forgotten reading that.