I have never read anything by Ernest Hemingway, and want to know what the big deal is.
What should I read first?
The only thing I’ve read by Hemingway was The Old Man And The Sea, and only because it was part of school curriculum.
It was good, as I recall, partly due to its non-epic length.
He uses short words and short sentences. He gets a good rhythm and he repeats a word until it’s like the first time you’ve heard it. He’s relentless in his use of a word or a phrase that works.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is probably my favorite by him. The Sun Also Rises also brings the knockout.
Hemingway said that a short story should be like an iceberg, 6/7ths of it beneath the surface. The short stories are not for beginners. So start with a novel.
I’d go with The Sun Also Rises, because it’s an important novel as well as being an important Hemingway work. Pair it with Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for a tour of the '20s.
I actually like both books, but every reader has different favorites (and dislikes).
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My Mother actually liked a short story collection of his. Not In Our Time was one of the stories and may have been the title of the book.
*For Whom the Bell Tolls *remains one of my favorite books. Just an honest, raw view of war. His style isn’t for everyone, but I enjoy it. The Old Man and the Sea is almost a perfect piece of writing. I’d start there. Many of his short stories are great reads as well if you want to begin there. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, for example.
I read the Nick Adams stories first, when I was young. Loved them.
I would start with The Old Man and the Sea as it is representative of his style, but also short and accessible. From there I would read some short stories (his best work in my opinion). But don’t go in willy nilly. As FeAudrey said the story stories can be difficult. Big Two Hearted River Parts 1&2 is not the place to start (it’s great, but don’t start there).
Read The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Hills Like White Elephants, and probably A Clean, Well-Lighted Place…maybe Snows of Kilimanjaro. Then on to the big novels. In order read, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, a Farewell to Arms then…if you still want more, go for A Movable Feast, his memoir. Then back for more short stories and maybe more non fiction like Death in the Afternoon, or the Green Hills of Africa.
That should get you through just about everything.
I did NOT enjoy The Old Man and The Sea but I LOVED The Sun Also Rises.
I should re-read Old Man, maybe I’d like it more now…
And then consider what you have read - he is fan wanking himself and managed to get publishers to pay him to fap off to himself. One of the more stultifyingly stupid authors I was ever forced to read in school. Right up there with My Darling, My Hamburger and Old Yaller.
For Whom the Bell Tolls and the Sun Also Rises are both excellent places to start.
The Old Man and the Sea… is just God-awful. When I read it in high school, my teacher was in love with Hemingway. So the only negative thing I allowed myself to write about it was “Hemingway has brilliantly captured the essence of fishing: hour upon hour of boredom and tedium.” The rest of the essay was BS about the symbolism and deep inner meanings that I can’t remember.
The key thing about reading Hemingway for the first time is to remember that there are no Hollywood endings. For example, my favorite of his short stories is “Up in Michigan” where a young girl has a crush on a guy who asks her out… and then he date-rapes her. She walks off, alone. The End.
If you are able to appreciate how much more real and true this is than the Disney princess version of the story, you’ll like Hemingway (excepting the Old Man and the Sea, which sucks). If you’re left thinking “You can’t end a story that way!!!” then you’ll probably hate Hemingway. You have to be able to enjoy the soul-crushing demolition of your happy preconceptions to like Hemingway.
I’m not sure I understand this. Is it a whoosh?
Yeah, start with “Old Man and the Sea.” You can then move to “For whom the bell tolls” and “The sun also rises.” If you’re curious about bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon” is a must read.
I’ve only read one Hemingway novel, and that was The Sun Also Rises. I would not recommend to start with it. Not because it was not ‘good’, but because I really couldn’t find a single thing to like about any of the characters, which made it a rather difficult read to get the feel of a ‘new author’.
“In our time” was about as insipid as TSAR but it affected me a lot, mainly in pitying Ernie. Think of a guy who’s had a hard war, who can’t keep a steady job, can’t keep a girl, drinks and brawls all night, sleeps all day, and who finds solace only in trout fishing. I find that more powerful than any character by Tolkien or Dostoevsky.
H is for young men. The more experience you have the less you’ll find to like in his work. Sun Also, his 1st published, is his only good novel because it is the only one that is not written about himself. The characters in Sun are not likable, but that’s the point, they have had everything valuable burned out of them by the world wide cultural suicide that was the war. His 2nd, A Farewell To Arms, has some of the best prose in American writing but rowing across the lake to Switzerland with Catherine he leaves the best part of the story behind (but my mom’s favorite book). By the time he gets to For Whom the Bell his prose is losing its focus because he pretended to be fluent in Spanish and his importing of spanish grammatical idioms into english is just stupid and makes it really hard for me not to rip old man and the sea in half and run screaming naked…most of the short stories are good, some great, get a collection called The First 49. Then get a copy of Bukowski’s Women and wash that taste of hem out of your mouth with a bottle of cheap wine…
Jesus Christ, My Mother liked that?
The man does not like Hemingway, just as I do not like Stephen King.
I understand that, it’s the “My Darling, My Hamburger and Old Yaller.” that I don’t get. I figured “Old Yaller” = Old Yeller, but I had never heard of the other one. Had to look it up.
I think that The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is the best thing he wrote, and a great place to start.