This book lives rent free in my brain

[Anonymous No.23211171]

Some people say it's about trauma (from the war). Some people say it's about simping. Both these things are true to some degree.

But for me it's a hard-hitter because life is really like this. You'll go through some weird, painful experience but there's never a satisfying conclusion at the end -- the people involved just drift away, time goes on, and you're left with an unpleasant memory that just lingers in your mind. And your friends are wrapped up in their own problems just like you, so nobody truly understands one another, everyone is alone. The only brief peace is during the fishing trip where they can briefly stop thinking. They just endure some terrible experience, cope about it with alcohol and daydreaming, then it's over.

Many people's lives are actually like this. Are we just too weak? Or were we screwed by fate? The closing line of the novel says it all
>"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

We can imagine a world where things went differently, but maybe the Spain trip was doomed, maybe it was destined to be hell. We don't know. We'll never know. The question just hangs there, taunting us. Could things really have gone differently?

[Anonymous No.23211207]

Yeah, things could have been different if he didn't get his dick blown off. He could have fucked that whore for awhile and be miserable and heartbroken after that too.

[Anonymous No.23211249]

>Are we just too weak?
Yes and there's no shame in admitting this. It's why we're social animals more than we are solitary ones. No one can fully empathise with you or your suffering, but under the right circumstances and with the right people you can collectively find comfort in that understanding and seek to hold each other's hand in the void. Life is a constant state of struggle, of strengthening and of weakening and striving towards a better state of being is the process in which we give our lives purpose and meaning. Everyone is alone, but if we can accept that knowledge and come to terms with it, then maybe we can all succeed in being alone together.
*passes the blunt*

[Anonymous No.23211347]

>>23211171
There is something fascinating when writers skillfully explore aimlessness rather than execute a plot. It can feel life-like in ways that a conventional three-act structure cannot. It slowly dissolves the question: "Why is this scene happening? What does it contribute to the plot?" If life doesn't seem to following this logic, then why should a novel do so?

[Anonymous No.23211435]

>>23211171
I was waiting the whole damn time for Cohn to use his boxing and when he finally did it felt so very cathartic but so tragic that he used it on Jake and the matador

[Anonymous No.23211611]

Thank you anon, you express it more beautifully than I could. Been reading this book, and just got to the fishing trip

[Anonymous No.23212069]

Why do modernist writes love cuckoldry and alcohol so much? The Great War was not the only war in human's history and yet modernist writes are almost singled out by how big of wrecks they were.

[Anonymous No.23212223]

>>23212069
>cuckoldry
>alcohol
Two staples of literature that appear absolutely everywhere since antiquity

[Anonymous No.23213906]

>>23212223
True. It's even in the Odyssey.

[Anonymous No.23213943]

>>23211347
An anon paraphrased one view of the novel as a series of seemingly unrelated events that lead to a revelation that ties them together. There is no plot, until there is. There is usually some kind of three act structure under it, but many of the better novels don't have what you would call a traditional plot. If you look, every chapter builds a case that leads to, not always a resolution, but an epiphany and catharsis of some kind. Not always for the characters in question either, but for the reader.

[Anonymous No.23215260]

>>23213943
Hemingway himself said he alters the real-world events to get closer to the true significance of events.

In other words, he was a melancholic person by nature, and the Spain trip IRL wasn't as bleak as the book, but he could perceive all these things under the surface, what Loeb and Lady Duff were really like, and sorta condensed them into archetypes while retaining their complexity. It's honestly genius how he did this, the characters in the book feel exactly like real people, but they're actually slight exaggerations so Hemingway could express his point.

I don't know any other writers who could characterize quite like this. When other authors try to "bring out the true nature" of characters, they just morph into cartoons like Tom Buchanan. Reading Hemingway feels like reading a more honest, gut-punch version of reality.

[Anonymous No.23215279]

>>23215260
One thing I like about the novel is that you can have a mustache twirling villain with an alarm clock strapped to dynamite and it doesn't read as overblown or cartoonish. You almost have to write big to get subtlety across the page. Something I ran into with the people I have known is that you actually have to tone them down because the reality doesn't read as real as what it takes to make convincing fiction. I think he may have done both things.

I need to read more Hemingway because his influence is unavoidable and it's better to be conscious of it.

[Anonymous No.23215284]

>>23215279
I read A Farewell To Arms and Old Man and the Sea, but oddly they didn't resonate with me nearly as much as The Sun Also Rises. I do remember skimming his short stories a very long time ago though and it seems like they're just as good as that novel.

[Anonymous No.23215298]

>>23211347
I believe that following a strict plot is an outright detriment in art.

[Anonymous No.23215367]

>>23215284
He was a master of short stories, I've read quite a few of those. I honestly don't trust authors who don't have a few good short stories.

[Anonymous No.23215403]

>>23211171
It really is a thing of beauty and has me thinking that the traumas Hemingway suffered at the hands of his mother with his emasculation is mirrored in the protagonist.

[Anonymous No.23215418]

>>23211171
I love this book, it's sad but also very beautiful despite describing a very mundane vacation.

Peak Hemingway

[Anonymous No.23215428]

>>23211171
For me it was the train ride from Paris to Spain.

[Anonymous No.23215444]

>>23215428
One of the all time greatest bits of imagery in literature tbqhwy

[Anonymous No.23215464]

>>23215444
Checked

[Anonymous No.23215497]

>>23211171
Probably my favorite Hemingway novel though they all have masterpiece parts-the gut punch but expected ending of AFTA, the tension and political situation in Spain in FWTBT, the very meta and poignant and thought provoking TOMATS but TSAR is a masterpiece throughout. The aimlessness, the tension, the effects of the war, the great and nuanced characters. Every character feels thoroughly human yet larger than life and they all have their demons. Hemingway was always the master of nuance and the slice of life, and it all comes together in this novel. The fishing trip I’ll always see as one of the most cathartic, inspiring, and heartfelt episodes in all of literature. As they leave the fishing trip to go back towards their friends and the cities there is the ominous feeling they are going towards their doom after their reprieve. Hemingway’s best commentary on WWI never even really mentions the war: the fishing scene in TSAR, and the short story Big Two Hearted River (Soldier’s Home is also great). You never see the war though you get the feeling of what they went through and how they need to heal. Hemingway is a great novelist but it is his short stories that are his magnum opus and what solidifies him as an all time great. Surface readers don’t get much from Hemingway, it is the close and thoughtful reader which sees under the surface, and this is best exemplified in his short stories. He will always be polarizing because there are different ways of reading him

[Anonymous No.23215768]

>>23215260
>When other authors try to "bring out the true nature" of characters, they just morph into cartoons like Tom Buchanan.
Far enough about Gatsby, but Fitzgerald was able to do it successfully in This Side of Paradise, where all the characters are slight exaggerations of real people, and none of them become cartoons.

[Anonymous No.23215769]

>>23215768
Fuck, not This Side of Paradise. I meant to say Tender is the Night. My bad, anons.

[Anonymous No.23215785]

>>23212069
Because there’s a lot of fucking around and getting drunk going on out there. How can you write “realism” and ignore the passions of the people?

[Anonymous No.23216720]

>>23215769
Tender is great. I like This Side of Paradise too since it has some great descriptive lyrical imagery. I think Paradise is a little prototypical of what he would eventually write, but it's a fine novel anyways and worth at least one read.

[Anonymous No.23216766]

>>23211249
>The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.
>But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think...The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.
>So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody.

[Anonymous No.23216783]

Another book where Hemingway gets cucked. In this one he even gets cucked by a Jew. The girl he's in love with literally tells him to his face he won't marry Hemingway because he's too poor.

[Anonymous No.23217176]

>>23211171
>We can imagine a world where things went differently, but maybe the Spain trip was doomed, maybe it was destined to be hell.
From the literal standpoint this is exactly true. Book characters are entirely deterministic tools of their author, and even the "chance" occurances of their world are solely determined by that same author. So yes, in the trivial sense, we do know for sure that the trip was doomed and destined to be hell.
>The question just hangs there, taunting us. Could things really have gone differently?
To me this is also clear from a metaphysical standpoint. Only what is actual exists. Modal thinking isn't grounded in anything real, it's just a tool for hypothetical reasoning and predictions based on similar situations. Even in the multiverse concept where every possible permutation actually does unfold, the model is unbroken because those things are happening somewhere else to someone else, and only one thing is actual there too. Of course not knowing the future is functionally identical to its being undetermined from the subjective perspective, and talking about what "might have been" is still useful in the sense that that thinking is a part of perfect manifold that composes the future out of the past, presumably a part that earmarks certain better futures as "your" future. But from my perspective, yes everything that actually does happen was inevitable.

I also really loved this book, I read it much later in life but the really uncomfortable, bored, stunted, resentful, denialistic, but also sometimes fun and partially fulfilling friendship between the main cast really took me back to high school in a way I absolutely wouldn't have clocked at the time but cuts deep now.

[Anonymous No.23217222]

>>23212069
>The Great War was not the only war in human's history and yet modernist writes are almost singled out by how big of wrecks they were.
It was a concretely different war than any that came before it. Nobody achieved anything significant except to get their most promising young men blown to bits by an enemy who couldn't see them. There was no personal catharsis for anyone, nobody won and got to write an uncontested revisionist account of why it was good and useful and their enemies really needed to be killed. Everyone went in drunk the childish heroic belief that their fundamentally superior culture would trivially destroy all opposition in a few months and instead everyone waited powerlessly in entrenched positions as everyone they knew impersonally died for nothing.
War was better when you got to rape and pillage and go home and lie about it because no one was left to say different. You get less fucked up when you get a chance to kill your enemy and win, but not when you have to just mechanically, distantly wait to be killed, and no matter how many of them you kill nothing actually changes in your day-to-day.

[Anonymous No.23217743]

>>23217222
Relevant (checked)

[Anonymous No.23217926]

>>23215428
fuck, I speed read that part

[Anonymous No.23218171]

>everyone in class is going to read old man and the sea for our next book
>oh ive read that before
>teacher makes me read the sun also rises instead
what did he mean by this

[Anonymous No.23218314]

>>23217222
This is why I always maintain that WW1 was the superior war compared to WW2. Everyone walked into 1 expecting a good ol' fashioned war from the Napoleon days, marching into battlefields with bayonet charges, light cavalry, some artillery fire, and at the end a few nobles would get married and country borders would get redrawn and everyone would get old reminiscing about the good ol' war they had back in the day. Then you had wake-up calls like Battle of the Frontiers and the Marne that completely changed that idea.

[Anonymous No.23218839]

>>23218314
>expecting a good ol' fashioned war from the Napoleon days,
Did they really when they had the Franco-Prussian war and Krim war inbetween?

[Anonymous No.23219932]

Bump

[Anonymous No.23220782]

>>23218839
Yes. the only war before the Great War that had any similar impact was the American Civil War. The thing that broke people from WWI wasn't just that it was a meat grinder, it's that it was a meat grinder that was killing every noble that signed up. No one was safe from artillery. The scale of the death and how egalitarian it was, wiping out entire family trees, landed or not. All across Europe; that had the impact.