In reading novels from a variety of decades past, I find it strange–such as with At Swim-Two-Birds–that the language seems to come from a bygone era:
My only response was to slam the front door as I left the apartment. I rushed furiously down the stairs, my eyes brimming with tears of rage as I stepped outside. The street was freezing, desolate, suffused in an eerie blue radiance. I felt as if my heart had been flayed open. Everything around me trembled. (p. 42)
Zafon published this first in Spain in 2002 and it was translated and published in Great Britain in 2004. It just appears to me to have been written in the language style of use more at the turn of the century; formal, precise.
Perhaps it is the translation that makes it stand out so. Perhaps it is just the style of the more formal European literature. It reads easily, of course, but it does have me imagine a different time than the late 1940s in which it is set. A reference to a telephone or an automobile stands out to me as if it were an anachronism. Being a child of the 50s, I do remember how things were, the postwar changes that brought a sense of modernism into the family home and on the televisions.
An odd feeling, this.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology