Registered: Oct 2001
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Posts: 17889

I just finished this today. I drag books out quite often over many many days, but this one went in about a day or so. I'll need to digest this one. I don't know that I care for his style really, but I want to read For Whom The Bell Tolls now and see if I like it any better. Don't get me wrong. I recognize Hemingway for a great artist, and I think he is at the top of his craft in his own way. But his style leaves me a bit flat at first, at least in this book. I know he liked the same books I do, however, and I like the way he uses mountains and cold and the idea of home and the rain and an hundred other natural symbols in the story. He uses a unversal language in a sense, rather than referring back again and again to some presupposed corpus of shared literary knowledge to inform and reinforce his stories. And I thought he told the story very well.

So yeah, I think the book merits its critical appeal and place in American literature - whatever that means - but I don't know that the story itself grabbed me that much. That's what would put it on a list of great books I had read, but not a list of favorite books of mine. I think, however, that I will enjoy FWTBT much more. And I would like to read Death In The Afternoon as well before I put him down for a while.

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