It is strange that I read Hemingway so late
in life. His first book that I picked up, Farewell to Arms, made me sad. But
his style made me curious and fueled my ever dormant ambition to become a
writer. He has a crazy style of narrating a story unlike anyone I have read.
Short pithy sentences that coalesce an outbreak of emotions and a collage of
images are easy to read and hard to grasp. A reader just cannot read on. He has
to pause and let Hemingway fill that silence with meanings.
The two novels – A Farewell to Arms and The
Sun Also Rises – that I have read so far are unfashionable as far as fashion of
reading novels goes. For every undergraduate student in India TS Eliot is a
must, Ezra Pound too is common, but Hemingway is rare.
There is a reason I have mentioned
Hemingway with two modern poets. There is similarity among these three. It is
sad that I didn’t read him while I was coming to terms with the idea of reading
to pursue a method of writing. He might have given me clues though it is
accepted that he is impossible to imitate.
A Farewell to Arms is about war. It is as
unsentimental and as depressing as a war novel can be. But the sadness of the
hero is never dwelt upon, and love seems to be the only refuse, though a
temporary one in the case of its narrator. The weight of the war makes hope a
futile attempt. Hemingway is honest and scrupulous and unpretentious just like
the horror that war brings to the humanity.
A semi autobiographical novel, A Farewell
To Arms narrates the futile attempt of its first person narrator to run away
from the battlefield. Such inglorious actions are celebrated by Bernard Shaw in
Arms and the Man.
Shaw weaves a morality play through a soldier who carries chocolates instead of
bullets and believes nine out of ten soldiers are born fools, Hemingway instead
creates a world weary man who has seen too much to be witty and has
participated in war too long to have an opinion. The doomed love of Frederic Henry – the narrator – and a
British nurse, Catherine Barkley signifies war as the monumental harbinger of
suffering. In the end their son is
stillborn and hemorrhage of Catherine thereby leads her to death. Hope
is dead and as Nat King Cole sang, although in different context, the dream has
ended, for true love died. Finally Henry walks away from the hospital in the
rain.
The Sun Also Rises is another book that is
written in understated and deceptively simple style. There is no central point
in this book much like its characters. Written in journalistic style by the
narrator who happens to be a journalist carrying the scars from the war both
mental and physical, the novel keeps moving from simple recounting of events
concerning a group of expatriate people travelling from Parish to Spain.
Characters participate in heavy drinking, promiscuity, fishing and the Festival
of San FermÃn in Pamplona
to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. These characters together
create the lost generation who are once and for all damaged by the First World
War.
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