He was joking, mostly. Here's an article that mentions it: [link]

Gris,

Literature phd Beau says the following about Sun Also Rises:

impotence was symbolic of the age and symbolizes something about war and the modern era. He has not read the book since graduate school, so he is a bit fuzzy on the details.

Typo, I have not read any Hemingway that was not assigned- I read Old Man, The Big Two Hearted River, Hills Like White Elephants, and The Sun Also Rise. The only one I liked was Sun Also Rises. Everything else was of the blah blah blah man pain school to me. I didn't know the word man pain, but because the Steinbeck, Hemingway, Bret Hart, Ted Hughes, Updike and Salinger I ended up with in high school, I just wanted to read something else!

I know I read Old Man and the Sea. I think I read the whole thing, I may have started skimming at some point. All I remember about it is flipping through it and thinking "really there's still more". Which looking at a synopsis of the story must have been my reaction to all the sharks.

Oh, and I forgot the Fitzgerald. Plus my mother liked Henry Miller.

It is sort of coming back to me, but isn't the inevitability of them not working out and the relentlessness of time beating on cf Gatsby what is referenced by the title bible verse

Turn turn turn. It wasn't the season

but the narrator's response is "isn't it pretty to think so."

True. And maybe that has some power. Still, it's a lot of then-I-went-fishing-and-then-there-were-bullfights-and-then-we-got-drunk to get to that. There are moments where he literally writes "And then... . And then... . After that .... And after that..." It's like the plot summary of a boring movie, with random bull-gorings that are described so passionlessly they give me slow-blinks. Which is maybe the point, to show how disconnected blah-dee-blah-blah but that doesn't make it more interesting. At least to me. I would like an arc.

This is why I dislike Hemmingway.

Love Gatsby, though.

I think the "and then....and then" etc is rhyme ally matching the wave like rhythm of the bible verse. Where everything is very inevitable, and it is just this slow beating. It is actually coming back to me why I liked it. I was also reading Virginia Wolfs The waves then, and it has a similar rhythm in parts. It is probably more fun to read in literature class than on ones own, because neither the plot nor the characters grabbed me, but in relation to the despair of the time period and the use of language it was pretty intersting

That would be rhymically. I can't get the iPhone to work

Interesting that you liked "The Sun Also Rises" but not "The Old Man and the Sea". Blows my theory away.

I always thought "The Old Man and the Sea" was perfect Hemingway. Poetry in the spare simple prose. A human in a futile fight, but not giving up, struggling every second of the way get what he needed from unforgiving nature to make up for what was not provided by an even more callous and unforgiving society. And the strength it took to fight that fight and the human suffering behind it. And while Hemingway usually portrayed manpain, to me "The Old Man and the Sea" was not about manpain, but about human pain in someone who happened to be a man. (In fairness to those who see this as manpain, the main character happened to be a man because Hemingway was incapable of portraying women as fully human except for very brief stretches.) To me, the "The Old Man and the Sea" is the one work where Hemingway slipped, probably accidentally, away from the portrayal of machismo to portraying the intense stoicism you sometimes find in the very poor who work hard in jobs where they undergo intense suffering. And the very short novel is not just about the sharks, but about the work of fishing, and about the old man, and about the old man's life.

I can understand not seeing this; the reader has as much to do with the tale as the teller. But if you were wondering what people who love that book get out of it, there is one data point for you.