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.
I'm a hundred pages into
Cold Kiss,
and it's really good!! I mean, I didn't really doubt that, since I remember reading a chapter a long time ago before it was published, but now it's in PRINT and it's MAGICAL.
Is this going to be a series or a trilogy?
Glass Heart follows it, but that's it.
Oh, that's it? It's just a duology? Those are becoming a thing these days! I like it! It's sort of the perfect balance between "Man, this book is great, and I would like more" and "Holy crap, how many books have I committed to with this thing..."
