Sunday, September 14

ignore me in the parking lot

in high school i read hemmingway's for whom the bell tolls. i expected to enjoy it. hemmingway was an interesting man. his works are famous and i assumed there must be a reason for that. however, i found the story dry and his writing style terribly boring. for years i dismissed him and all his novels.

just recently i decided to give him another chance. i picked up a collection of his short stories on a whim and was blown away. his style is direct and dry but it perfectly captures the snippets of life he portrays. i fell madly in love with his brief but insightful portraits of broken people.

this had me wondering why i enjoy him so much now when i had sincerely detested him mere years ago. i returned to for whom the bell tolls and found that, while i still did not enjoy that particular novel, it didn't grate on me as it had before. how am i different? what has changed?

i decided that it is the taste of failure that he so accurately conveys. when i first read him i was an idealistic teenager who had yet to experience the reality that life does not go the way anyone expects. i strongly believed - and part of me still does believe - that i had the strength to create the life i envision for myself. but life marches ahead without any concern for what we want or what we think we've earned. hemmingway subtly captures the embitterment of people who feel they have failed to live up to their own expectations. he observes cynicism in its purest form - disappointed idealists.

i feel that his short stories are nearly perfect in every way. his novels are also interesting. his poetry, however, is terrible. it's humorously reassuring that even hemmingway failed at some things.