/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19995486]

>mnimilast writing style
>claims to not write anything that isn't necessary
>hundreds of pages going back and forth to different cafes detailing the name of the cafe and drink

What did hemingway mean by this?

[Anonymous No.19995508]

>>19995486
That cafes and cocktails are essential infirmation

[Anonymous No.19995518]

>>19995486
Holy shit I've never seen a purer example of someone getting filtered.

[Anonymous No.19995543]

>>19995486
Hemingway is a bimbo

[Anonymous No.19995546]

>>19995486
Hemingway is a very good stylist. I won't say he's the greatest but he had a lot of talent. Even Joyce respected his work and they were great friends, and Joyce was kinda king when it came to 20th century prose.

Hemingway's sentences work really well when read aloud, I think because he thought about the process of the breath when he structured his writing. If he has a long sentences, he usually follows it with a short one or offers some sort of punctuation to allow a pause. In other places when things are meant to feel breathless and heady, he does not allow any pauses so that you feel like your careening down a hill or being pulled along by a rushing current. I think his terseness is overstated and most often that is the thing that people look to when they imitate Hemingway badly, along with his plainness of word choice.

>Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color.
This is a sex scene from For Whom the Bell Tolls. In this case, it makes sense to be breathless. I think Hemingway has more in common with the modernists of his day, like Joyce and Stein, than people generally realize.

>In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
If the Bell Tolls passage was breathless, I think this one is more leisurely. Hemingway uses repetition a lot, I think he probably learned it from Gertrude Stein and Joyce. The "and" polysyndeton here links the details of the italian village, the pebbles in the bed of the river, the dust and the leaves. It is beautiful, I think.

[Anonymous No.19995550]

>>19995546
>I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Another passage I love. This from A Farewell to Arms. Much of the novels of the early 20th century, especially the european ones (and Hemingway was greatly changed and influenced by his time in Paris and the time he spent with Europeans, like Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and others) took a ton from Flaubert. One of the hallmarks of Flaubert's beautiful style was his careful use of details and aesthetic lists. The listing of the abstract words in the Farewell passage reminds me of that.

I would love to speculate more if others would contribute or post Hemingway passages that they like. He is not my favorite author but a favorite, and I have read a lot of him. If you want to write, I sincerely believe a lot can be learned from him.