Posted on 09/27/2014 7:22:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
Welllll....okayyy.
So you think the literary giants who wrote "Dreams From My Father" and "It Takes A Village" were better, huh?
You certainly are a savage beast.
You might try his short stories. They’re very good and less bulky than those long-winded novels.
If I understand the Hemingway biography (bore-ogrophy) correctly, He had those kind of 'problems' as a recurrent thing in his life, due to an injury suffered during WWI...
the infowarrior
It was a bit of hyperbole. But the keyword is ‘overrated’. I have heard some leftists speak highly of Dreams from my Father, but I haven’t heard it widely praised among less biased readers/judges. If it is considered Nobel Prize material by any serious authors/editors, etc., I have yet to hear of it.
As for rating It Takes a Village, has anyone in the world suggested it is great literature? It’s just a political tome, written by a person some in the left really like. If you are inclined to that political philosophy, then you like that aspect of the book. But to agree politically with a book is not to rate it as a literary masterpiece. No one, but no one has suggested It Takes a Village should rank alongside Shakespeare, Mann & Faulkner.
People do slobber over Hemmingway. Some claim he’s the greatest writer to ever draw breath. That’s the ‘overrated’ part. If you see the distinction?
Dean Koontz is my fav
“So he was not only an awful writer and a slobbering drunk, but a sadist, too.”
And, reportedly, committed suicide when he realized his own homosexuality.
It takes a Village, written by Barbara Feinman.
I never knew that about Hemmingway. I knew he was very, very left-wing, but I never knew he actually worked for the KGB. Yikes!
As for his writing...I like Hemmingway okay. He’s middle of the pack in the field of the “classic” writers I’ve read. I’d take him over Joseph Conrad (just never could get into that guy’s writing), but he’s got nothing on Steinbeck (for my tastes, anyway).
I would agree. If your going to read the writings of a communist, at least Steinbeck could be entertaining.
Wavy Gravy was born Hugh Romney. Far out, man.
It was an education. I had it. They told me about the greats, the great authors. We read Hemingway. We read everything. I went on TV once to talk about it. What I talked about was The Sun Also Rises. I did not like that book, but I pretended that I did. It was boring. It was narcissistic. It was silly. “Silly,” I called it. Time passed. I became more comfortable with opinions. The opinions were my own. I joined Free Republic. There was a time I wrote there. What I wrote was that Hemingway simply sucks. His work is just as silly as it ever was. And the sentences are short. Very, very short. Hemingway sets off my “sh+t detector.” Yes.
Semper Fi my FRiend
No magic, just mental illness which is hard for the rational and healthy mind to digest therefore it is cherry picked for reasoning and equated with whatever bits of normalcy can be found. For the liberal, also demented thinking, it is a treasure trove of maze-like emotional responses and a quagmire of battles within.
Listening to Hemingway throughout a lifetime would have been like listening to Gollum, if you have read the trilogy, but have hope Frodo and faith in gardening.
I agree about the short stories — much better than the novels. I long ago came to the Dorothy Parker conclusion that “Deep down he’s shallow.” But he was one of the finest prose stylists writing in the English language. The opening paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms” displays the spare, vivid style that made him famous. As I’ve often told my friends, he had very little to say but had an amazing gift for saying it.”
Some of his short stories are unforgettable to me, like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” But in the long run I suspect he won’t have a high place in the pantheon of 20th Century writers.
Hemingway was ‘cleaning his gun’ according to his relatives probably in the same way that my grandfather ‘had a heart attack.’ Many years later I learned that, by purest coincidence, he happened to have it in a closed garage with the auto exhaust running.
IRRC, Hemingway’s death was somehow ruled accidental & his widow saw to it that he received burial according to Catholic ritual.
FWIW, I’m Catholic & in the back corner of our parish cemetery is the grave of a suicide. The ground there is unconsecrated & a large pine tree grows out of the middle of it.
Nowadays suicides routinely receive Christian burial by reason of insanity (no sane person would do such a thing!).
It appears Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing & made a cold rational decision. His health was mostly gone by age 61.
The shotgun he used to commit suicide was immediately gnashed up into bits of wood & metal, & then scattered to thwart ghoulish souvenir hunters.
Your sentences are short. Their lives flee in seconds. Then they are dead. Like those for whom the bell tolls.
;^)
+1
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