But this novel is limpidly beautiful: grave, ironic, detached.
My son is buried in a beautiful grave at Llanaber near Barmouth in Wales.
One showing a cross at the bottom of a huge shell crater carries the words "A beautiful grave".
Her agony and her rapture stay interior, and they flip-flop like nerves in this beautiful, grave black-and-white movie.
But I think of Cuyp as an optimist who genuinely loved what he painted -- that light, those beautiful, grave-eyed animals -- and the process of painting itself.
Chang-rae Chang-rae Leerendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy.
If this is so, then Pope Francis has an ally in Leo Steinberg, the displaced Russian Jew whose modernist, heretical instincts led him to the grave, beautiful, profound, and, at times, playful depiction of Christ's sexuality.
The Metropolitan Museum's solution — a small, grave, beautiful photography show — is an apt one, though some people will grumble that Sontag had tributes enough in her time, and doesn't need, or deserve, any more.
This visual style owes a strong, self-conscious debt to the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who, over the last dozen years, have shaken up the world cinema scene with their grave, beautiful, urgent films, including "Rosetta," "The Son" and "L'Enfant," about the everyday struggles of ordinary people.
In this grave, achingly beautiful novel by Philippe Claudel (gravely and beautifully translated from French by Hoyt Rogers), a village policeman writes out his sorrow-laden journal of the plague years.
" 'Gilead' is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid," James Wood wrote here.
