I've been slowly getting into A Moveable Feast over the past few days. I'll read it in snatches--in my room after completing my Chinese homework, or sitting on the windswept steps of Widener Library in between class. This time last year I was reading Hemingway as well. A Farewell to Arms was one of our assigned readings for AP Literature, and I remember quite vividly sitting in a cubicle in the lab where I worked, furtively reading about World War One ambulance drivers and their beloved nurses when I was supposed to be analyzing the molecular structure of Chemical compounds using complicated computer software I had no interest in tangling with. It wasn't my favorite book. Hemingway's style, the detached, unadorned syntax and the methodical rhythm to his words isn't really my thing. His writing floats serenely in and out of my head, leaving no trace besides a few scattered facts and a general sense of huuuunh? The writing's not complicated, and maybe that's my hang up with Hemingway. Whenever I read his writing, I never feel compelled to understand, to delve deeper into his psyche and discover what drives him as a writer and a thinker.
It's weird, how reminiscent his memoir is to his fiction. The writing feels just as detached, and I can almost no believe that this is Hemingway actually writing about his own life. The book does pique my interest in how it describes the competitive, arcane world of the "Generation Perdue"... giving insight into not only Hemingway's life but also the lives of Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald, contemporaries of Hemingway who were incredibly influential in his work.
I don't know; I just don't like Hemingway.
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