Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss

A famous work by Lévi-Strauss; the descriptions throughout are highly creative yet present to the reader very specific, memorable images. There were so many excellent examples I could choose from to write my imitation, that I simply had to choose the hardest one I could find:

In my imagination, I associated Brazil with clumps of twisted palm trees concealing bizarrely designed kiosks and pavilions, and I assumed the atmosphere to be permeated with the smell of burning perfumes, an olfactory detail which had no doubt crept in through an unconscious awareness of the similarity of sound between ‘Brésil’ and ‘grésiller’ (to splutter in burning), and which is more responsible than any actual experience for the fact that, even now, I think of Brazil first and foremost as a burning perfume.

Brazil compared to a burning perfume! I can’t even do it justice:

In my mind, I always associate the Columbia River Gorge with steep hills the color of sienna earth pigments spread all over with grey sagebrush beat down upon by an inescapable, hot sun, and always in the air, no matter which direction I face, an incessant wind, a textural reality that feels like it’s blowing right into me, filling me up, gorging me like the area’s namesake, Gorge, and this similarity is more responsible than anything else, for why, when I think of the Gorge, I think first and always of an incessant wind.

Letters on Cezanne, by Rainier Maria Rilke

In this work, Rilke creates some very imaginative description, especially regarding colors. The color blue, for example, he describes in various "active" ways, attributing qualities to the color that aren't normally associated with colors, let alone such nuances of the color blue: juicy blue, full of revolt blue, blissful barely blue, Egyptian shadow blue, etc. Here he applies the same innovative descriptive prose to the smell of heather:

But how glorious it is, this fragrance [of heather]. At no other time, it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more than honeysweet where you feel it is close to touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost, and yet again wind; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea.

First, Rilke transforms the smell of heather into the smell of earth itself, then he contrasts that description with the smell of the sea. Then he goes beyond simple comparing and contrasting to delve deeper into the nature of the comparison. He describes the smell of heather as bitter in one aspect (as it relates to taste) and as sweet in another (as it relates to hearing). The smell contains both the final end of everything (the grave) and the never ending movement of earth and the heavens (the wind). When he describes the smell as being of tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea, the reader can sense just what aspect of Ceylon tea Rilke is describing; the aspect that shares a quality with the earthly, resinous, thickly chemical smells of tar and turpentine. Absolutely genius description!
The bar is set inconceivably high for me to imitate Rilke's prose. I'm sure to fail; yet I must try. I must choose a smell and describe it in the style of Rilke, thus understanding his writing so much better after undertaking my own intimate struggle with it. In an attempt to survive this endeavor, I shall choose a smell that is complex and rich in contrasts:

How glorious it is, this smell of a city downtown, in the summer, from high above. It's only now, when the evenings are warm, the smells mix together into this one agreeable smell; a smell that isn't any less than the smell of fast food, a hamburger or a doughnut, almost rank where it touches upon grease, yet pungent with green where it resembles hay dirty from the sheep in their pens at the state fair. Layers of smell contain the sudden shock of exposure: the shirtless men mowing lawns are sweating; bodies are ripe; summer is ending, and yet again the heat; beer spilled in an alley, the low water of the nearby river, and Chinese food.

Sportsman's Notebook, by Ivan Turgenev

In a selection from Sportsman’s Notebook entitled “Kassyan Of Fair Springs,” Turgenev demonstrates aspects of good narrative description. He creates an image in the reader’s mind and, using a careful selection of adjectives, creates a mood describing a fresh, perhaps cool, gently-laying scene. Although he doesn’t put solely one idea into each sentence, each idea has its separate clause, especially the last sentence of shoots and stumps, funguses, strawberry plants, and mushrooms:

Over the clear sky the high thin clouds were hardly stirred, yellowish-white, like snow lying late in spring, flat and drawn out like rolled-up sails. Slowly but perceptibly their fringed edges, soft and fluffy as cotton-wool, changed at every moment; they were melting away, even these clouds, and no shadow fell from them. I strolled about the clearing for a long while with Kassyan. Young shoots, which had not yet had time to grow more than a yard high, surrounded the low blackened stumps with their smooth slender stems; and spongy funguses with grey edges—the same of which they make tinder—clung to these; strawberry plants flung their rosy tendrils over them; mushrooms squatted close in groups.

In preparing to write my imitation, I looked much more closely at Turgenev’s writing. He starts high above, describing the entire sky, and ends with a close detail of groups of mushrooms. He also used the sky and clouds to set the tone: high thin clouds, soft and fluffy, slowly changing. The description of things on the ground gives the impression of turning one’s head to look at one object then another. I attempted to incorporate this into my writing:

Overhead, blue-grey clouds clump tightly together while wide patches of black clouds, higher up, threaten intense rain. The clouds twist the sun’s evening light, causing the air to fill with a yellowish half-light: the grass looks yellow, the red of the hibiscus is muted, and the pale flowers of angel trumpet flowers seem transparent. I walk about the yard for a time while Ollie plays in the grass. A fall crocus is sending out its first slight leaves, grooved with grey down the center, and a small, white shoot, covered by a green cap, is just poking out of the base; the summer’s flowers, desiccated and brown, twist through the crocus’s delicate leaves; green blades of grass, sharply upright, running into this flowerbed from the lawn all summer, are spiking throughout; a small maple’s feathery leaves, slowly burning with orange from the cooling weather, gently covers all.