I want to hate Hemingway
I really do. I want to resist that spare, bare-bones, masculine approach to writing. I want lush words and beauty of sound and style. I want swashbuckling prose with ruffles and panache, both robust and beautiful.
Then I read something like this:
"Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. " (from "Cat in the Rain")
It's a beautiful couple of sentences.
Never mind the rest of the language in the story is ugly as hell. It's almost worth reading the thing for those sentences together, splashing in my ears.
What do you hear when you read?
Then I read something like this:
"Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. " (from "Cat in the Rain")
It's a beautiful couple of sentences.
Never mind the rest of the language in the story is ugly as hell. It's almost worth reading the thing for those sentences together, splashing in my ears.
What do you hear when you read?
posted at 3:55 AM
2 Comments:
I hear voices.
And I do hate Hemingway. His writing-style was designed to be taught in classrooms, IMHO, because that's the only way to catch some of his allusions. If no one can understand what you're trying to say without an interpreter, what's the point?
Granted, I did like his Nick Adams stories, when I was required to read them and I've never read "Cat in the Rain".
Darn, and I wanted to have my works studied in lit classes...
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