Fragility of Porcelain
The wonders of the natural world provide one of the first opportunities for metaphorical language within the deeply lyrical prose which comprises this unusual work of fiction. “The sky, even at ten o’clock at night, was porcelain, a pale solid from which the snow detached and fell.” It is France in 1917 facing the ravages of the first World War. The metaphor here casts the sky as not just something lightly colored but also fragile. The fragility of porcelain has been literally put to the test under the conditions of this setting. Describing the sky with such imagery replicates the deep-seated consciousness of connections between environmental and symbolic language.
Quiet Rebellion
Marie Curie, Nobel-prize winning scientist, is a character in the story. The narrative occurs at a point when the tide of French views toward her had turned on the basis of assumptions that the Polish native had actually stolen credit from her French husband Pierre. “Their very being there, undiscovered, was spit in the eye of the oppressor.” A woman who is facilitating Marie’s safe escape from her detractors is using metaphorical language here to show that rebellion is sometimes done quietly, in the shadows, and far from the excitement of open activism. Living beneath the radar in a place she is not expected or wanted is the gesture or rebellion akin to spitting in the face rather than raising a weapon against suppression.
What is Love?
Both asking what love is and asserting an answer to that question has long been a favorite topic for authors to engage the power of metaphorical language. A character named Peter recognizes that a woman named Mara views love as something complicated whereas Peter himself “knew love was a sharp blade slicing an apple: cleaved – both blade and bond.” Out of context, this metaphorical imagery would be so vague as to be almost meaningless. A more precise understanding of what Peter means is arrived at through the context of his not believing it is a particularly complicated concept. Love is everything capable of producing both crisis and opportunity.
One Word
The narrator ruminates on how people so often view everything through the perspective of what one single word means to them: “faith, family, war, illness. It could be your own word or someone else’s, like wearing glasses that were the wrong prescription – wrong, or just not yours.” The simile making the comparison to vision problems is suggestive of the possibility that this perspective toward everything that is based around one singular concept is subject to momentous possibilities. One may continue getting everything wrong just by clinging to the supposed truth of that one-word concept which creates a frame around the whole of experience.
The Love That Kills
Another narrative rumination is on the subject of the power of a great love. “The kind of love that is like a fatality.” This simile at first seems to have negative connotations with its suggestion of an incapacity to move past and get over. What the narrator really means by the comparison to a fatality is that deepest sort of love which is like a death when it is over. A love that enters so profoundly into one’s system that is a like feelings of grief that that never lets you forget just how consequential its impact was upon you.
