For me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera; On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-Ocean Vuong; Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The most tragic, painful, human suffering can be presented and these writers present it in the most excruciatingly beautiful prose.
On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-“A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?”
What is the beauty for you?
Ok, so like, I started this book. And out of curiosity googled the Rachmaninoff piece the diplomat was playing on the piano during the intro. And like. God. Damn. Perfect. Like, the quintessential definition of atmospheric. The music was the literal transliteration of the mood the prose evoked.
And then got to the whole storyline with the detective and the poet AI and was like. Has this author ever met a woman in real life? Might be a product of the time...
This was my primary issue with Hyperion and largely the reason I struggled to enjoy it. I feel like if I were a student of classical literature, it would have resonated differently. But there were so many sexual scenes, and they felt so out of place with the narrative and characters that it frequently broke my suspension of disbelief. Martin Silenius's story was particularly bad for this. Throughout the whole book, I counted only 2 women (Sarai and the CEO) who were not sexualized in some way.
In fairness, Silenus's character was specifically written to be a misogynistic "old goat". Every character has their own biases that bleed through the text. Silenus only sees tragic, self-obsessed assholes everywhere while Weintraub's story is mostly filled with empathy and genuine human connections. Also notice how everyone talks about all the "indigenies" in this dismissive, condescending way until the Consul's story.
But with that said, I do generally agree. The author's biggest weakpoint seems to be writing women.
Yeah, I know it's supposed to be Silenus telling the story. But with an author who is already oddly sex-obsessed writing a character even more sex-obsessed, who has the emotional intelligence and vocabulary of a middle school boy at times, it becomes quite a difficult read. Is it possible to execute it well? Certainly. Do I think it was in Hyperion? Not really, no.