Item — HN Reader

The prose in this article is pretty, and characteristic of the New Yorker style. Sometimes I want to articulate what exactly the New Yorker style is, but I don’t read enough anymore to pick out its distinguishing features. I think the extended simile here is very common to New Yorker pieces:

> the islands are oddly similar to the Shetlands or the Isle of Skye—the bleak, rocky landscape; the blustery rain; the nearness of the sea—as though a piece of Scotland had broken off into the Atlantic and drifted eight thousand miles south, past Ireland, then Portugal, past Morocco and Mauritania and Senegal, down past the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay, and come to rest just a few hundred miles north of Antarctica.

In short, it takes a mundane detail like the similarity of landscapes and climate between the Falklands and Scotland, and adds an interpreted fantastic explanation of it by simile (landmasses moving across the Atlantic). It can feel excessively twee and almost corny when you identify the technique, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I wonder if readers have identified other notable examples of the New Yorker style from this article or elsewhere.

4 comments

It may be New Yorker style but it’s also the style of a lot of pre-1950 travel writing. Travel writing at the time assumed that the reader would never visit the destination being written about, or for that matter any other destinations farther than a few hundred miles from home, so a lot of that older travel writing is infused with myth, simile, and prose which would today seem florid.

I found it interesting that in the enumeration of countries, Argentina is missing. Straight from Uruguay to Antarctica.

Must still be upset about that Maradona goal (even though I haven't checked if the author is English, to be honest). And to partially get back on subject, I personally find those kind of enumerations that the OP mentions pretty boring and too intellectual, too mid-19th-century English writer that nobody reads out of pleasure anymore.

It's very different to The Economist style, which merges dense information with terseness and wit.

I really didn't need an enumeration of countries that I can see perfectly well on a map or in my mind's eye. It just adds unnecessary baggage to what was a clever concept.

I don't find this style unique to the New Yorker but more to romantic colonialism.