The description of people's appearances in novels and shorter pieces of fiction

Обсуждение книг на английском языке, домашнее чтение, правила чтения на английском языке. Развитие письменной речи. Эссе, деловое письмо и другие виды письменных работ.

Модератор: zymbronia

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Zlatko_Berrin
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#26

Сообщение Zlatko_Berrin »

Juliemiracle пишет: 23 мар 2022, 12:57 I should know - I'd been dying my hair for many years.
Okay, I won't argue with you about hair colors =D You're definitely more of an expert than me.
Juliemiracle пишет: 23 мар 2022, 12:57 This thread is definitely not for discussing hair colour.
Should we start a new thread? XD
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#27

Сообщение Zlatko_Berrin »

VictorB пишет: 23 мар 2022, 15:47 What I wonder is whether Zlatko will figure out what is hidden behind its poetic title :)
I'm on my way =D
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#28

Сообщение Juliemiracle »

Zlatko_Berrin пишет: 26 мар 2022, 20:11 Should we start a new thread? XD
Should a sir wish so, I will bow to his will :)
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#29

Сообщение VictorB »

A fluffy blonde, considerably younger than the man, wearing a leopard coat and a hat to match, came into the compartment.
I grieved briefly for all prowling animals threatened with extinction. The lady was carrying a handsome leather jewel case and smelled strongly of a musky perfume. A huge diamond ring graced the finger over her wedding band.
... She rewarded me with a smile. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight years old, and up to now she had obviously had every reason to feel that a smile of hers was indeed a reward. I was sure that she was not the man’s first wife, maybe not even the second. I took an instant dislike to her.
Nightwork by Irwin Shaw
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#30

Сообщение VictorB »

I moved back to the top step with Casey, turning around and surveying the garden. With a loud crack, the door was thrown open and Jonathon DiMarco stepped out, as though onto a stage, throwing his arms wide.
 
He was in his mid-sixties but looked like he had the energy of someone in their twenties. He was impeccably dressed in a charcoal suit, without a tie, clean shaven, and his salt and pepper hair was neatly combed back. He was a former police captain in the Chicago Police Department, and he held himself with strength and excellence. He had broad shoulders that looked like he spent his weekends chopping firewood with an axe, and skin that looked like he’d spent one too many holidays in the Florida sun.
(from The Shooter by Peter O'Mahoney)
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#31

Сообщение VictorB »

For nearly 30 years, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson lived the life of a decadent monarch, with the power to satisfy his every want. Tall (6 feet 4 inches), trim, and broad-shouldered, Nucky Johnson was a ruggedly handsome man with large, powerful hands, a glistening bald head, a devilish grin, friendly gray eyes, and a booming voice. In his prime, he strode the Boardwalk in evening clothes complete with spats, patent leather shoes, a walking stick, and a red carnation in his lapel.
—from Nelson Johnson's non-fictional Boardwalk Empire

To those who watched the Boardwalk Empire TV series (which was definately inspired by the book):
Don't you think that the red carnation and patent leather shoes are the only details in Nucky Jonson's description that may somehow fit his cinematographic character?
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#32

Сообщение VictorB »

The old man was on the front steps now. By the time we got through the front gate, which had a couple of old plow points hung on a wire to pull it shut and clank to announce the visitor, and had started up the path, the old man had come out of the door. He stopped on the steps and waited, a not very tall old man, and thin, wearing blue jean pants and a blue shirt washed so much that it had a powdery pastel shade to it and a black bow tie, the kind that comes ready-tied on an elastic band. We got up close and could see his face, brown and tooled-looking, with the skin and flesh thin on the bone and hanging down from the bone to give that patient look old men's faces have, and his gray hair plastered down on his narrow, egg-thin old skull–the hair still wet as though he had given it a dab with the wet brush when he heard the car, just to be looking right at the last minute--and slow blue eyes in the middle of the brown folded skin. The blue of the eyes was pale and washed out like the blue of the shirt. He didn't have any whiskers or mustache, and you could see that he had shaved pretty recently, for there were two or three little nicks, with the little crusts of blood on them, where the razor had got tangled in the folds of the brown dry skin.
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
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#33

Сообщение VictorB »

We sat down at the table, Old Man Stark at one end and Lucy at the other. Lucy wiped the perspiration-soaked wisp of hair back from her face, and gave that last-minute look around the table to see if anything was missing, like a general inspecting troops. She was in her element, all right. She had been out of it for a long time, but when you dropped her back in it she hit running, like a cat out of a sack.
The jaws got to work around the table, and she watched them work. She sat there, not eating much and keeping a sharp eye out for a vacant place on any plate and watching the jaws work, and as she sat there, her face seemed to smooth itself out and relax with an inner faith in happiness the way the face of the chief engineer does when he goes down to the engine room at night and the big wheel is blurred out with its speed and the pistons plunge and return and the big steel throws are leaping in their perfect orbits like a ballet, and the whole place, under the electric glare, hums and glitters and sings like the eternal insides of God's head, and the ship is knocking off twenty-two knots on a glassy, starlit sea.
So the jaw muscles pumped all around the table, and Lucy Stark sat there in the bliss of self-fulfillment.
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#34

Сообщение VictorB »

There was such silence that he could hear a clock ticking, and the sound of his own hand passing over the surface of the wall, trying to find the switch. He found it, and in the light which leaped up he saw, stiffened against a dark curtain evidently screening off a bedroom, a girl standing, holding a long black coat together at her throat, so that her face with its pale brown hair, short and square-cut and curling up underneath, had an uncanny look of being detached from any body. Her face was so alabaster pale that the staring, startled eyes, dark blue or brown, and the faint rose of the parted lips, were like colour stainings on a white mask; and it had a strange delicacy, truth, and pathos, such as only suffering brings. Though not susceptible to aesthetic emotion, Keith was curiously affected.
From "The First and the Last", a short story by John Galsworthy
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#35

Сообщение VictorB »

He smiled bleakly at the younger man, who was only twenty-six and whose stocky build made him appear smaller than his nearly six feet of height. Robert had sandy-red hair, thick and glossy, a round and boyish face pinkly colored, good wide blue eyes, a short and obstinate nose, a gentle mouth, a dimpled chin. He also had a small mustache, the color of his hair, and big shoulders. His hands, too, were big and square, and so were his feet in their black and polished boots. The day was hot; he wore thick black broadcloth and what Jonathan Ferrier usually described as a hard black inverted chamber pot, though it was only a New York derby. His collar, of course, was high and stiff, which gave his florid color an unfortunate enhancement, and his tie was black and fastened firmly with a pearl tiepin.
Testimony of Two Men by Taylor Caldwell
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#36

Сообщение VictorB »

1.
She was dressed in a close-fitting tailored suit which followed her form exactly and which was enhanced by a small dark leather hat, pulled fetchingly low over her eyes. A leather belt of the same color encircled her neck. By a leather leash she led a French bull and over one arm carried a most striking coat of black and gray checks not too pronounced and yet having the effect of a man's modish overcoat. To Clyde's eyes she was the most adorable feminine thing he had seen in all his days. Indeed her effect on him was electric—thrilling—arousing in him a curiously stinging sense of what it was to want and not to have—to wish to win and yet to feel, almost agonizingly that he was destined not even to win a glance from her. It tortured and flustered him. At one moment he had a keen desire to close his eyes and shut her out—at another to look only at her constantly—so truly was he captivated.
2.
She was, as he decided on sight, more intelligent and pleasing—more spiritual—though apparently not less vigorous, if more gracefully proportioned. As a matter of fact, as he saw her at first, she appeared to him to possess a charm which no one else in this room had, a certain wistfulness and wonder combined with a kind of self-reliant courage and determination which marked her at once as one possessed of will and conviction to a degree.
—Theodore Dreiser
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#37

Сообщение VictorB »

Трудновато мне читать Ирвина Уэлша с его "скоттицизмами" (да и тематика весьма специфична), но вот понравилось, stylewise, такое описание:
The white-faced young man stood his ground. His attire, a tastefully blended mix of quality designer clothing, did not so much hint as scream at ideas beyond station and salary. At just over six foot two Danny Skinner often seemed larger: his presence augmented by penetrating dark brown eyes and the black cater-pillar brows that sat thickly above them. His wavy raven hair was combed in a side parting which gave him a raffish, almost arrogant bearing; this enhanced by his angular face and a twist to his thin-lipped mouth suggesting levity, even when he was at his most sombre.

The stocky-framed man facing him was in his late forties. He had a ruddy, squarish liver-spotted face topped by a mane of amber-coloured creamed-back hair that was whitening at the temples. Bob Foy was not used to being challenged in this manner. One of his eyebrows was raised incredulously; yet in that motion and the expression his slack features had settled into, there was just a smidgen of enquiry, even of mild fascination, which permitted Danny Skinner to continue.
— I’m only doing my job.
From The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
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#38

Сообщение VictorB »

Physically, he [Wild Bill Hickok] was a delight to look upon. Tall, lithe, and free in every motion, he rode and walked as if every muscle was perfection, and the careless swing of his body as he moved seemed perfectly in keeping with the man, the country, the time in which he lived. I do not recall anything finer in the way of physical perfection than Wild Bill when he swung himself lightly from his saddle, and with graceful, swaying step, squarely set shoulders and well poised head, approached our tent for orders. He was rather fantastically clad, of course, but all that seemed perfectly in keeping with the time and place. He did not make an armory of his waist, but carried two pistols. He wore top-boots, riding breeches, and dark-blue flannel shirt, with scarlet set in the front. A loose neck-handkerchief left his fine firm throat free. I do not at all remember his features, but the frank, manly expression of his fearless eyes and his courteous manner gave one a feeling of confidence in his word and in his undaunted courage.
Following the Guidon by
Elizabeth Bacon Custer
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#39

Сообщение VictorB »

My father appeared to me to have recovered all his old force and zest during his several months in Florida, and he looked wonderfully rejuvenated. Some years back, as a result of surgery, he’d lost the musculature in his midsection and developed a stomach, but otherwise he was, for his age, a most fit-looking man of medium height whose spontaneous, unassuming virility and spirited decency had made him instantaneously appealing to the widows around. He had been impressively strong through the arms and the chest when he was young, and a little of that solidity was still discernible in his upper torso, particularly so with this resurgence of vitality. Though he could be bluntly outspoken and dominate a conversation with his boiling anti-Republican diatribes, he happened to be an agreeable-looking person as well, and the mundane forthrightness his appearance exuded registered on all sorts of people as real charm. If he’d had the leisure for it, or the instinct, or the need, he might even have been handsome in an anonymous sort of way, but “handsome” was no asset where he’d fought his battles, and long ago he had settled upon looks people trusted rather than envied or praised. Now, of course, his hair was very thin and had only a touch of brown left in it; and his face, though unlined, had slackened along the jawline into the pronounced family dewlap; and his ears seemed somehow to have been tugged a bit, like taffy, and lengthened. Only his eyes, really, remained “beautiful,” and you never would have known that unless you happened to be nearby when he slipped off his glasses for a moment. Then you would have seen how much gray there was in those eyes, and that there was even some green there—up close you would have seen how gentle and untroubled those eyes were, as though they alone had existed since 1901 beyond the reverberations of that crude, imperfect, homemade dynamo whose stubborn output had driven him through the obstacle course just about everything had been.
Patrimony by Philip Roth
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#40

Сообщение VictorB »

Heidi wondered what others saw when they looked at her. In her imagination, she was still a twenty-year-old girl with her whole life ahead of her. In reality, she was a forty-year-old mum of two whose once-thick head of blond hair was losing its lustre. Her teeth needed whitening and her jaw-line was fast losing its elasticity. As gravity pulled it south, it took with it her freckles. Nowadays they were less like cute brown dots and more like fat ink-blots. It wasn’t just her looks that had toughened over the years; so had her personality. Her job had made it harder for her to see the good in people. And she had forgotten how to cry either happy or sad tears. Sometimes she felt as if she were made of rock; break her exterior and she was just as solid inside.
Passengers by John Marrs
Five stars of five!
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#41

Сообщение VictorB »

Harold Barnes presented a more convincing Teddy Roosevelt then I did a Hindu swami: blunt mustache, squinting eyes behind round glasses, teeth like piano keys, stocky build draped in a black suit. He wasn’t exactly a Rough Rider when it came to the personality though. It was easy to see how hard the loss of his daughter had been on him. His complexion was ashen, and he more dragged himself around than walked, as if he hadn’t slept since she’d disappeared. Another man might have been frantic and filled with anger, but Barnes was mild as a lamb and spoke so low I often had a hard time hearing him.
The Girl in the Glass by Jeffray Ford
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#42

Сообщение VictorB »

Leopold Rifkin was twenty years older, better read, and far more learned than I was ever likely to become. Yet I had a sense that I knew more than he ever would about certain things. His appearance seemed to confirm this feeling. Every time I saw him I wondered how he could even take care of himself. He was barely five four, with slight, sloping shoulders. Even for his size, his head was surprisingly small. A few wisps of brownish gray hair were combed carefully across the top. His nose was slightly hooked, and his mouth was oval shaped and as prim as a spinster’s. It was his eyes you remembered. When he looked at you, it was as if someone from another world were staring out from behind them. When he spoke about Athens, I had the strange feeling he was speaking about people he had actually known. But sometimes I worried whether he could find his way home without help.
The Defence by D.W. Buffa
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#43

Сообщение VictorB »

As soon as I saw him I started to smile. He never changed. He was in his mid-forties, but he still looked like an overfed teenager wrapped in baby fat. The tan corduroy jacket he wore struggled against itself in a tug-of-war over a single, exhausted, plastic button in the front. There was barely a line to disturb the tranquillity of his round face, not a fleck of gray in the thick tousled madness of sandy brown hair that covered his head. He had the slightly astonished look of an eager sheepdog. Children loved him; old ladies thought they should help him across the street.
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#44

Сообщение VictorB »

I watched her make her way through the crowd and my astonishment grew with every step she took. She seemed completely at ease, entirely at home among people who were used to nice clothes and expensive dinners. She came gliding across the room, head held high, a gorgeous woman in a stunning black dress, turning the head of every man and nearly every woman in the place.
...
She was a changeling, a creature devoid of any identity of her own, able to assume in an instant the infinitely varied shades and colors of the world around her. She was a bright shiny surface, a mirror that would show you whatever she thought you wanted to watch.
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#45

Сообщение VictorB »

Judge Dalrymple was a voluminous, ruddy-faced battleaxe of indeterminate age that Joe estimated as being somewhere between sixty and two hundred. She had piercingly sharp grey eyes set amid ample folds of flesh, tiny rosebud lips which she kept tightly pursed together, and grey hair that hung in strands on either side of her cheeks, like frayed curtains. Trussed up in folds of heavy black cloth, a string of pearls around her neck, and brandishing a pencil stub with which she made copious notes, she conjured images in Joe’s mind of horsewhips and foxhounds, of English country fetes.

For the first half-hour she repeatedly eyed Blake, seated beside Joe, with undisguised suspicion, and Joe wished that his colleague had dressed a little more conservatively. With his ponytail, his unstructured black suit, black shirt and white knitted tie, Blake didn’t look like the kind of man to whom this woman would warm in a million years.
Host by Peter James
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#46

Сообщение VictorB »

Blake had opened the passenger door and was helping Stassi out. As she stood up, loose strands of her hair tossing in the wind, she seemed a little disoriented. Jet lag, Joe assumed, stepping down from the porch.
She was about five feet five inches tall, with long, brown hair clasped in a velvet headband, a slim figure and a good-looking face; strong, high cheekbones, a pretty snub nose and a well-proportioned mouth. Only her complexion, which was pallid after her long journey, diminished her attractiveness.

Blake introduced her, and Joe stepped forward, holding out his hand. He was surprised how strong her grip was, which seemed out of character with the rest of her as she smiled shyly, revealing perfect white teeth, so perfect that Joe took them for the work of a good orthodontist.

Her eyes engaged his fleetingly: dark brown eyes with large pupils, making them hard to read. She smelled of a cologne he vaguely recognized; it had a classiness reminiscent of the scents that lingered in the lifts of expensive hotels. Yet at the same time there was something faintly old-fashioned about her that Joe found immediately endearing.

Part of it was the classic way she was dressed, in a neat blue blazer with a pleated skirt, a plain cream open-necked blouse with a horsy* silk scarf inside, and flat black shoes with a single gold chain across the tongue**. Part of it was in the quietness of her demeanour; in contrast to the eccentricities of so many of his students, she struck Joe as being reassuringly normal.
*Удивила такая тонкая деталь,
** как и цепочка над "язычком" ботинок.
Если всё верно понял, конечно ))
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#47

Сообщение VictorB »

Хотя и не описание внешности конкретного персонажа, но уж больно художественно-изобретательно
(особенно во 2-м абзаце) описана выживающая из ума старость:
The tobacco-shed-smelling place was run by two nicotine-stained brothers who were always sniveling and bickering at each other like old maids. On a bench to one side, ignoring the arguments like crowds at a boring tennis match, a nest of old men stayed by the hour and the day, lying upward about their ages. One said he was eighty-two. Another bragged that he was ninety. A third said ninety-four. It changed from week to week, as each misremembered last month's lie.

And if you listened, as the big iron trains rolled by, you could hear the rust flake off the old men's bones and snow through their bloodstreams to shimmer for a moment in their dying gaze as they settled for long hours between sentences and tried to recall the subject they had started on at noon and might finish off at midnight, when the two brothers, bickering, shut up shop and went away sniveling to their bachelor beds.

Where the old men lived, nobody knew. Every night, after the brothers grouched off into the dark, the old men dispersed like tumbleweeds, blown every which way in the salt wind.
Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

Кстати, для тех, кто не читал - это детективно-криминальная мистерия от мастера научной фантастики.
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#48

Сообщение VictorB »

She was immense.
Her real name was Cora Smith, but she called herself Fannie Florianna, and no one ever called her otherwise. And I had known her, years ago, when I lived in the tenement, and stayed in touch with her after I moved out to the sea.

Fannie was so huge that she never slept lying down. Day and night she sat in a large-sized captain's chair fixed to the deck of her tenement apartment, with bruise marks and dents in the linoleum which her great weight had riveted there. She moved as little as possible, her breath churning in her lungs and throat as she sailed toward the door, and squeezed out to cross the hall to the narrow water-closet confines where she feared she might be ignominiously trapped one day. "My God," she often said, "wouldn't it be awful if we had to get the fire department to pry me out of there." And then back to her chair and her radio and her phonograph and, only a beckon away, a refrigerator filled with ice cream and butter and mayonnaise and all the wrong foods in the wrong amounts. She was always eating and always listening. Next to the refrigerator were bookshelves with no books, only thousands of recordings of Caruso and Galli-Curci and Swarthout and the rest. When the last songs were sung and the last record hissed to a stop at midnight, Fannie sank into herself, like an elephant shot with darkness. Her great bones settled in her vast flesh. Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body. Propped up with pillows, her breath escaped and sucked back, escaped again, fearful of the avalanche that might happen if somehow she lay back too far, and her weight smothered her, her flesh engulfed and crushed her lungs, and put out her voice and light forever. She never spoke of it, but once when someone asked why there was no bed in her room, her eyes burned with a fearful light, and beds were never mentioned again. Fat, as Murderer, was always with her. She slept in her mountain, afraid, and woke in the morning glad for one more night gone, having made it through.
 
A piano box waited in the alley below the tenement.
"Mine," said Fannie. "The day I die, bring the piano box up, tuck me in, hoist me down. Mine. Oh, and while you're at it, there's a dear soul, hand me that mayonnaise jar and that big spoon."
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