Her music, too, can be both muscular and streamlined; it is recognisable almost immediately for its distinctive physical palpability.
The important details, the ones that make fiction's intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up off the sidewalk.
"Beasts" has an exciting palpability, an oxygen-sharp sense of the present tense.
In both books, rich people strive to turn the palpability of money into metaphor, much as they do in Henry James's fiction.
It was Warhol's talent to perceive that in every home movie there is a sense of Time trying to express itself as a new kind of creation, a palpability which breathes in the being of the film.
A major new translation of "War and Peace," by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf; $37), brings us their palpability as perhaps never before.
Everyone longs for restoration, for the son to come home and become simply good, just as everyone longs for Heaven, but such restoration, like Heaven itself, is hard to imagine, and in our lack of imagination we somehow prefer what we can touch and feel — the palpability of our lapses.
And the use of sublime music seals the palpability — especially the concluding pages of the Berlioz Requiem, whose circling string motifs and quietly thudding drums suggest the utmost consolations of belief, especially in tragedy and death.
But Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy's "characters, acts, situations".... Always, in Pevear and Volokhonsky's version, we feel the physicality of Tolstoy's details.
What sets his writing apart from much Holocaust testimony is his relish for portraiture, the pleasure he takes in the palpability of other people, the human amplitude of his noticing.
