Hemingway

I finished Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms last night. Most. Depressing. Book. Ever. But why should that surprise me? It's Hemingway, after all. Let's see...how many of Hemingway's characters drink cognac for breakfast and appear to be shells of an empty existence? But that is one of the reasons I like Hemingway: There's something about the ominous sadness and desperation in his novels and characters that intrigues me.

I haven't read Hemingway in a while, not since grad school. I had a professor at West Florida who was (and still is) very passionate (some would say "obsessed") about Hemingway, and I took this professor's course--probably to fulfill an American Lit requirement--and the whole course was Hemingway. And I enjoyed it. This professor's quizzes were ridiculously nit-picky (I think I made a 20 on the first one), but he taught me an appreciation of subtext, how Hemingway implies something much deeper in his simplistic dialogue and descriptions. (One of my favorite short stories that is a more overt example of this is "Hills Like White Elephants.") While I certainly had some complaints about the professor--he was a bit of a chauvinist and he made us watch way too many videos about bullfighting in Spain--in the end, he cultivated in me an appreciation of Hemingway that continues still.