Hemingway

This is a beautiful photograph. Ernest Hemingway with his two sons, playing with kittens on the pavement. Got it from Wikipedia.

Hemingway is currently my favorite author. I love his now (in)famous terse, gritty writing style. Not always, mind you, but when it works, it really does. To the uninitiated, Hemingway uses a style which basically does away with all the excesses and baggage that comes with writing. He uses a lot of stream of consciousness (I love using these terms), and his descriptions are beautiful, more often than not. At the same time, its very easy to overlook it all if you're in a hurry, which is one of the mistakes I made while reading A Farewell to Arms. A Farewell to Arms got me irritated the first time I started reading it: seemingly endless descriptions of a war torn country, and short, extremely short dialogues and a dry style of narration with not an ounce of emotion in it. Well, not emotion in the traditional sense anyway. Hemingway, it seemed to me then, had left out not only the 'excesses' but also most of what it takes to write a good novel! I was wrong. He leaves a lot to imagination, and I like that perfectly fine. He uses the imagery to help the emotions come to life, not blatant descriptions of feelings. He lets the reader decide what to make of a certain scene, and how to read the people in it. And the style works wonderfully in a war novel like A Farewell to Arms: war is ugly, and this dry, tough way of writing really brings out the futility and sadness associated with war, without giving in to emotion. Surprisingly, and ironically, this often leads to a greater emotional impact on the reader than usual. The last one-third of the book will shock you, not with what happens (the ending you can easily predict, especially if you have also read For Whom the Bell Tolls and Old Man and the Sea; Hemingway is not known for happy endings) but how it leaves you empty and drives home the point, all over again, that war is probably the most stupid, futile and sad thing on Earth.

I am reading For Whom the Bell Tolls now, and I think this will turn out to be the best Hemingway novel I've read yet. Also, he was a master short story writer, and I think he wrote short stories much better than he did novels. Which says a lot, considering how much I like his novels too.