This is a trial



Hemingway was a favourite of mine, back when I used to carry books with me wherever I went. I don't do that as much now, but I do keep up with my fiction reading. I’m often re-reading older classics. Current fiction writers leave me unsatisfied. I can see their talent (of the talented ones, that is), but their stories are imbued with their personalities, as though they cannot shake off their egos as they write. Also, their stories have macabre, strange, or nihilistic endings, and I come away bewildered or depressed. These stories often have no light at the end of the tunnel.

I read two of Hemmingway’s books: The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms. I'm not a literature critique, so I don't really know how to start analyzing Hemmingway's writing - it's already been done ad infinitum anyway by experts and laymen alike. But, these two books, and that long epic For Whom The Bell Tolls, are told in first person, and are accounts of unrequited love in many ways. The characters, which he brings to life so clearly, are very modern people who enter all kinds of debacles, yet they come out surprisingly pure and unblemished despite their weaknesses and failures. What surprised me this time around are the long, unending sentences that Hemingway uses at times, producing almost a trance-like meditative quality. This goes against the hard simplicity of his prose that many analysts have described about his writing. His description of places, whether it is a café in Paris, or the Spanish (and Italian) countryside, resonates in my mind – always has – and is an urge to visit these vivid locales.

Here is a quote from The Sun Also Rises, describing a walk in the beautiful northern Spanish countryside: