Your thoughts about Ernest Hemingway?

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PashaRu
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Re: Your thoughts about Ernest Hemingway?

Post by PashaRu »

Overrated. He wrote more like a newspaper reporter than a novelist. Just a dry, uninteresting telling of events. He could take the mundane and make it...well, mundane.
[Insert quote here. Read. Raise an eyebrow. Be mildly amused. Rinse & repeat.]
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Post by David Dawson »

sheenasmith0715 wrote:I agree with DATo completely about The Old Man and the Sea being Hemingway's redeeming work. The thing I hate most about Hemingway's other works is his treatment of women. With The Old Man and the Sea, there are no women, and thus no reason for me to be offended! I believe Hemingway treated the women in his books as he treated the women in his life - badly. It's a shame he wasted so many years on a body of work that leaves so much to be desired and only started writing better material right before he killed himself.
It's not the greatest redemption though is it; "it's not misogynistic because it doesn't have any women in it." Which is not to say I don't get that that makes it much easier to read.
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Post by Ayisyen »

I am intrigued by his idea that writing is architecture and not a gateway into inner worlds.
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Max Tyrone
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Post by Max Tyrone »

Wow, a thread about Hemingway where mostly everyone bashes Hemingway. I'll type these words not to persuade anybody, but to offer my perspective on the man who won the Nobel Prize and ended his life with suicide.

One of the most prevalent complaints I hear from people when I ask if they've read Hemingway is that he's masculine and womanizing. Knowing bits of his life, of which will definitely lead some to infer that he was sexist, I'd have to say that his work says something different to me.

There are strong female characters in Pilar of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Marie in To Have and Have Not in that they are hardened by the circumstances that have brought them to the page. The characters and the scenarios in A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises strike me as ironic. I mean, in A Farewell to Arms, Catherine's subservience to Henry is so apparent and ridiculous at some points, and in the course of the novel, the reader sees that this kind of love is not meant to be due to obvious consequences. (We almost see the same case in For Whom the Bell Tolls, though I would say that El Sordo represents more of a masculine character, rather than Robert Jordan.) In The Sun Also Rises, it seems like everyone is disconnected with each other--and not precisely for the difference in sexes. We have all these guys fumbling for Brett, but we follow Jake Barnes, who has lost his manhood and cannot pursue her because of it. This model of masculinity I also found ironic, because we have these men trying to win her favor, while one doesn't quite "qualify" as a man, and Brett makes her decision to her liking. (I didn't like the novel all too well, though.) One only really needs to read Hemingway's short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, to obtain this image that masculinity can go to hell because it is not worth emulation, and that its practitioners receive ill fates; and that women can be masculine as well--not because men allow them to, but because of their choices, the ultimate character builder. Perhaps Hemingway himself was masculine, but I believe that he struggled with it, along with the women in his life, which maybe led to his suicide.

As for his writing style, that's something that will make or break it with the individual that reads him. Faulkner once said that Hemingway doesn't send his readers to the dictionary. While Faulkner is somewhat of a maximalist, I like both their styles respectively.
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Post by ryanjames50 »

I enjoy Hemingway, even though he can be a bit gruff at times. "Hills Like White Elephants" was very well written and is still one of my favorite stories of all time. As for him being arrogant, i don't really see it. This is the guy that said that the first draft of anything, even his own work was always crap. To me that shows a great deal of personal humility in my opinion.
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Post by Ventis »

Oh god, Hemingway... he's one of the great American novelists, but imho, in the US he's highly overrated. As a reader I used to like Hemingway's short stories and some of his novels - the earlier ones are just average, imho (and full of big words, adverbs, and long sentences).

My problem with him started when I decided to try writing stories in English, and l looked around for some advices for attempting writers. Almost every site, blog or forum on "creative writing" will push his style as The Only Right Way to Write. So much so, that some authors on those forums used the (in)famous "Hemingway app" to see if their writing meets the standard. And even though I'm aware that it's more a parody of his style, that this forced "minimalism" completely misses his point... it still soured his books to me.
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Post by Max Tyrone »

Ventis wrote:Oh god, Hemingway... he's one of the great American novelists, but imho, in the US he's highly overrated. As a reader I used to like Hemingway's short stories and some of his novels - the earlier ones are just average, imho (and full of big words, adverbs, and long sentences).

My problem with him started when I decided to try writing stories in English, and l looked around for some advices for attempting writers. Almost every site, blog or forum on "creative writing" will push his style as The Only Right Way to Write. So much so, that some authors on those forums used the (in)famous "Hemingway app" to see if their writing meets the standard. And even though I'm aware that it's more a parody of his style, that this forced "minimalism" completely misses his point... it still soured his books to me.
Yeah, I hear you on that. I haven't read that many short stories as I have novels in general; and I've read more short stories by Hemingway than I have any other writer, Poe and King coming at a close second. Even though I wrote a paragraph (perhaps insufficiently) defending him, I would say that Hemingway's style isn't for everyone, though I will admit that he does a good job at rendering the prose so that they're simple enough to take in, but still leaves something to digest, ergo his use of omission. I, myself, am not the biggest fan of his short stories; and I don't have that much of a compass to point in the direction of creative short stories. I hear that Truman Capote's short works are great, and those of Flannery O'Connor.
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Post by mich2491 »

I only read For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fare Well to Arms. I did not think much of them, their are a few parts that did get me going. But as they went on just seemed misdirected and just not relevant and wound up with a bad ending. The guy dies after sending them away, then in far well winds up having his lady and child die, but he seemed to only care about his lady. Really just under welmed by his work.
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Post by dgmal63 »

Hemingway was an amazing writer to me, but of course, other people might look at his faults first since he was a flawed human who loved booze and women way too much. I still enjoy all of his works to this day even though I really don't have one favorite that stands out in my mind.
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Post by Thesaurus Rex »

Isn't he dead now?
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Post by Stevefromtheblock »

Thesaurus Rex wrote:Isn't he dead now?
Duh, so are most people.
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Post by fenderjedi »

I haver only tried one of his books, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Having visited his house in Key West recently, I thought I should. I'm afraid I just couldn't finish it. I found his characters to be cardboard cutouts and the dialogue unbelievable. I know this is one of the literary greats but he just didn't do it for me. Maybe it was my frame of mind at the time, or maybe it was just the wrong book for me, so I will try again in the future, but for now there are far more enjoyable writers for me to try.

-- 12 Jun 2015, 02:20 --
Stevefromtheblock wrote:
Thesaurus Rex wrote:Isn't he dead now?
Duh, so are most people.
Actually, more people are alive now than have ever lived.
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Post by Thesaurus Rex »

That's a morbid thought.
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Post by Stevefromtheblock »

fenderjedi wrote:Actually, more people are alive now than have ever lived.
While it is impossible to state exactly how many people have ever lived, general estimates run around 100-110 billion. The world population right now is about 8 billion. Which means about 100 billion have died. So, most people are dead.
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Post by Mike_Lang »

Not a big fan of Hemingway. I've read several of his novels and they just never connected with me - or rather I never connected with them - in any real kind of way. That whole generation of writers (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc.) were amazing but many of their writings, in my opinion, just don't seem to be as relevant today. Unlike writers like Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper who seem timeless, Hemingway is very much stuck in his own era.

As far as his personal life, yeah, he was one of those type of larger than life people that you probably either loved or hated from the moment you met him. Hemingway always struck me as being the literary version of Orson Welles (whose work I do enjoy greatly) in that he always seemed to be performing, more concerned with creating a persona rather than living an "authentic" life.
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