Hemingway?

[Maximus]

Okay, defenders of Hemingway, let's here your voice.  I am trying to read, "The Sun Also Rises" and I simply can't make myself enjoy it.  His cryptic conversations and extra-lean writing are truly bothering me.  I just want something to happen.  It's just too cool...

I know many of you must like Hemingway.  And some of you have read "The Sun Also Rises."  Why is this considered such a great novel?

[MotherEarth]

Don't know, but he had 6 toed cats in Key West.  I never appreciated The Old Man and the
Sea either.

[Givens]

Hemingway is an acquired taste.  He is considered a "manly" author, mostly because he drank excessively and wrote about war and fishing and bullfighting.  Not my personal favorite either.

[Maximus]

Someone around here must love him!  My Hemingway dialogue, in which the female lead reveals that she's pregant:

"Let's go have have a drink?"

"Yes, let's."

"Don't be such a dreadful bore."

"Say, these hill look like White Elephants." 

Okay, so that was terrible.  I'm done trying to be funny, for now......

[MotherEarth]

Joined Gee in the humor department, eh?

[Maximus]

A sad attempt, I know.  I was just trying to capture why I fnd Hemingway frustrating.   

[Gee3666]

Joined Gee in the humor department, eh?

HEY! 

[Firefly]

ha ha ha!  i think there something terribly sexy about the old drunkard's writing.  it's lean and lovely.  just my opinion.   

[Bartleby]

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

That's the opening paragraph to Hemingway's short masterpiece "Big Two-Hearted River". I think it's a good example of his spare style, which really was a stunning development in Twentieth-Century fiction, and highly influential. Everything on an emotional level is suggested rather than explicitly stated, which, although it is part of Maximus' problem with him I think, is a pretty fair representation of the withdrawn nature of many males.

In this story, Hemingway's alter-ego Nick Adams has just returned from WWI and the burnt exterior landscape is in some sense a representation of his scarred mental landscape.

The current master of this sort of fiction, I feel, although he comes from a very different tradition, is Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for The Remains of the Day.

[vitis]

Last summer, I finally read 'Farewell to Arms' and loved it. I think the austerity of his writing is appropriate. He is dealing with big experiences, fighting WWI, falling in love and losing that love. I think the very spareness of the prose contributes to one's emotional response. I studied 'The Old Man and the Sea' when I was at school and loved that too.