The Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway

I promise that the timing of this post is not intended in any way to contradict Zach. The fact that I have just finished this book and loved it is purely coincidental. The only gripe I have is with whoever proof-read this edition. Typos are not only present, but inexcusably pervasive. I think I'll write a letter to Scribner. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the actual content. Let's move on. On the back of the book (which is the first forty-nine stories, not the "complete" stories--I guess there are a few more since this book first came out in 1938 and Hemingway died in 1961), there is a quote from a review in the New Yorker by Clifton Fadiman, which says: "I don't see how you can go through this book without being convinced that Hemingway is the best short story writer...using English." That pretty much sums it up. I don't really know what to say that hasn't been said before. These stories are wonderful. Some aren't as good as others, but just about all of them are good, probably about 38 of them are very good, and at least a dozen are masterpieces. Some of my favories, off the top of my head, are Fifty Grand, The Killers, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Up in Michigan, Indian Camp, My Old Man, Wine of Wyoming, Fathers and Sons, A Pursuit Race, The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Ten Indians, The Three-Day Blow, Today is Friday, The End of Something, and of course Hills Like White Elephants. Ezra Pound called Hemingway "the finest prose stylist in the world." Of course Pound was always biased toward brevity, but I think he may have been right.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Maybe I just have too high expectations. Maybe I just need to only read coverless books and wait till I’ve finished before discovering the author. Whatever is wrong with me, I have yet to experience Hemingway the way most people have, which is to say I haven’t loved his books. But hear me out. The Sun Also Rises—sweet characters centered on the narrator who is pretty plain, but nothing wrong with that. But they weren’t interesting enough to where they could do whatever they want and I would just happily follow them around carelessly. So the problem was I wasn’t sure what the conflict was as they traveled from place to place. Also, I can’t remember the girl’s name but she was really annoying. The Old Man and the Sea—readable for sure, and I’ve grown to like it more and more but I just don’t see where the genius is (ok, that’s probably my fault). I wanted to have more concern for whether he caught the fish or not but it wasn’t there and I couldn’t force it. I was really looking forward to reading A Farewell to Arms, especially after I presumed, and then argued, that it should have easily been ranked higher than Catch-22 on The List. But my third attempt at Hemingway was again not great. Which stinks because I want to like him so much—the man fascinates me, but his books don’t have the same effect.
But first, I want to say what I did like about this book. The dialogue is sick. The conversations in this book flow without flaw and it seems that when Hemingway was writing that he knew exactly what his characters would say next without his having to force words into their mouths. The man knows dialogue and in the short story, Hills like White Elephants, the dialogue does not get any better or meaningful. (I actually did really like that short story of his.)
But, like the complaint with the last book I read, I couldn’t care less about what happens to the characters. They are completely stupid and the two people closest to the main character, his girlfriend/babymama and his roommate, are the worst. They are absolutely obnoxious. The roommate, Rinaldio(?), is overly obsequious towards Tenete and calls him baby almost every other sentence. So not only is reading their interactions exasperating, it makes you feel like you’re peeping in on a Schmitt’s Gay beer commercial. Also, the nature of Tenete and Catherine’s relationship makes me want to throw up. You know those couples that can’t stop looking at each other and kiss every 2 seconds and ask questions like, “If I was thrown into a 4,000 degree fire without any firefighters around and was burned beyond recognition, would you still love me?” to which the answer is always yes? They’re kind of like that except smarter and can use richer and more poetic language but to me at least it was equally annoying. I also understand that this could have been the point to these characters but the ends don’t justify the means.
I’m not giving up on ol’ Ernie yet though. I want to read more of his short stories and perhaps if I enjoy them then eventually his novels will follow.

So this concludes war novel month for me and, regrettably, only one book truly stood out while the other three were only merely enjoyable, or almost that. Final rankings:

1. All Quiet on the Western Front
2. Going After Cacciato
3. (tie) Catch-22 and A Farewell to Arms

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Philip Roth is widely regarded as America’s best living writer, or at least one that’s actually publishing (coughSalingercough… tear). And after reading American Pastoral, I can certainly see why. But it was Tim O’Brien whom Joseph Heller, before he died, hailed as the best. (Perhaps there was some war genre bias going on, but nonetheless…) I read The Things They Carried (the book, not just the short story) earlier this year and thought it was great. A good piece of writing advice is to write about something you know and from that book you could tell O’Brien knows war. He lived it and breathed it in Vietnam so there is all this emotion and intimacy couched in his writing and reading him is actually pretty moving. The problem with Going After Cacciato though, despite its front, is that it’s not really a war novel. At least not in my opinion. I mean it starts off being in war but soon a small group of guys and their lieutenant take leave from the war to bring back one of their comrades, Cacciato, who has illegally fled the war to go to Paris. From there, the book is more about their journey to Paris and the interesting characters they meet along the way. The general outline actually reminded me a lot of The Sun Also Rises. The level of O’Brien writing that I found in The Things was still there but with a lacking plot, it was the only thing carrying this book.
The first chapter is actually really really sweet and with conviction I think it was originally a complete short story. In my opinion, it could easily be read as one—a very good one, I’ll say again. However, I think, and I may very well be wrong, that O’Brien tried to take this great story and continue to add 300-odd pages to it, which has to be a hard thing to do once you’ve completed a story that was only meant to be 15. Ergo, in the end, I found that I didn’t really care what happened to Cacciato and what they would do after they found him. Good prose, not so good plot. PWOAT.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

He looks ghastly, yellow and wan. In his face there are already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen them now hundreds of times. They are not so much lines as marks. Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has already pressed out the boundaries of the body. Death is working through from within. It already has command in the eyes. Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich… He it is still and yet it is not he any longer.

Continuing my literary assault on war books, I chose to read the purported greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front. I read it in a couple days and still all the while damning my inability to read faster because I wanted to soak up more and more of its goodness. I wish Remarque had written more. But therein lies the beauty of this story—its compactness. The writing is taut as hell and the short, declarative sentences that are much more matter of fact than ornate is what, to me, makes this book stand alone.

I think, like most people, I read this in high school because as I was reading, most of the scenes seemed familiar. I didn’t realize I had read it before until I was in the meat of it, but no matter—this book can be and should be read again and again. However, doing so may lead you to commit seppuku because it’s pretty grim and depressing stuff. But that would be a forgivable act because this book is worth it. If I (sorry, when I…) commit seppuku I think I will do it with this book in my hand. Wow, what a tangent. Anyway, you can tell that the content matter is of deep, deep concern to the author because he writes in such a sensitive yet sure and confident way. The emotion that he is able to evoke by using raw language, without extra details or flowery words, is amazing. It al seems so real, which I think is kinda the goal of war writing—to put a reader, who may or may not have been a soldier, in the trenches. But this book goes beyond blood and hand grenades. It has lighter moments where the comrades sneak out at night to see some French girls. They arrive at their doorstep wearing nothing but their boots because they had to swim part of the way.

What’s really great about this book is how it doesn’t look to expose how savage we become during war; rather, it looks at how war personally affects us, and leads us to consider some hard situations. For instance, the main character, Paul, has lost one of his good friends and he feels a moral obligation to write to his friend’s mother, whom he does not know, to tell her about her son. What are you supposed to write in that letter? How could you write anything at all? In another instance, Paul is behind enemy lines, inside a small crater filled with water. There is too much gunfire happening around him, so he must lie inside the crater, pretend to be dead, and wait. He decides that if anybody gets in the crater with him, he will not take any chances and go for the throat. When a feeble, though alive, body lands beside him, his first instinct is to shove the man’s mouth with dirt, but he cannot. Common humanity prevails and Paul is led to comfort this ailing man, no matter what side he be on.

The text is alive in this book. If stuff like this doesn’t move you then you should just go ahead and commit seppuku. (If there’s one thing we can conclude from this rambling of a book review it is this: you should commit seppuku whether you read this book or not.) If there’s any book campaigning against the war then I think creating poignant, realistic moments like these is the most effective way. Catch-22’s approach to showing the futility of war was humor, but this approach seemed so much more detached from the subject matter. All Quiet, on the other hand, can really draw you in. Its characters aren’t exactly memorable but there are issues they have to face—issues that are personally affecting that are unique to the war—that are incredibly moving. I don’t know how to fault this book.

I’ll end on one of my favorite passages that has real sweet imagery:

One morning two butterflies play in front of our trench. They are brimstone-butterflies, with red spots on their yellow wings. What can they be looking for here? There is not a plant nor a flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull. The birds too are just as carefree, they have long since accustomed themselves to the war. Every morning larks ascend from No Man’s Land. A year ago we watched them nesting; the young ones grew up too.

South Of The Border, West Of The Sun by Haruki Murakami

In Haruki Murakami’s South Of The Border, West Of The Sun, the narrator, Hajime, tells the story of his mostly failed relationships with women starting from the time he was in middle school. By the time he’s reached middle age, he has all the good things in life: a loving wife, two daughters, a second home in the mountains, and a couple bars that he owns and operates. But just as everything is going ever so smoothly, the girl he became the best of friends with in middle school and even loved (although he didn’t realize it at the time) suddenly comes back into his life. This event turns Hajime’s world upside down and he’s faced with the prospect of leaving his comfortable life for the woman he always loved.

Murakami writes in a startlingly realistic style. Although it didn’t hit me right at the outset of the novel, I remember that at about halfway through I realized just how intensely life-like the text is. This may seem strange and I admit that the sensation is hard to explain. The best way I can describe it is that, at times, I felt like I was actually living in the novel itself. I think there’s a certain precision in the words and sentences Murakami uses that creates this experience. Another way to put it is that it’s kind of like the feeling I used to get after listening to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I remember whenever I would finish listening to it I always felt like every single note, every sound on the album, was just right and could not have been any other way. With South Of The Border, it’s the same thing. And when it comes to failed relationships, this book nails it. For me, Marukami’s novel captures everything about what it’s like when things between couples go sour, which may or may not sound good to you but I enjoyed it for some reason.

And so I conclude: two thumbs, up.

By the way, for any of you Salingerphiles out there, you may want to check out this article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2219768/pagenum/all

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

‘Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.’ Chief White Halfoat nodded slowly with conviction.

This humorous quote is a perfect microcosm of Catch-22 and using it as an archetype, I can explain the entire book. If you have any whisper of a humor, you’ll find it funny. This is in part because it so directly and crudely contradicts itself. Contradictions, intentional ones, are packed into every cranny of every page, which should be unsurprising because catch-22’s are basically situations where outcomes contradict efforts (e.g. An insane person isn’t allowed to fly a plane but if you file for insanity that proves your sanity). It is catch-22 scenes like this that are stitched together to make this book basically plotless (there is without a doubt no climax), which is not necessarily a bad thing. Heller trapezes from different points in time, focusing on different characters and sometimes their perspectives on a situation that has already been experienced by another character. And when good writing employs something like this and is funny and uses black comedy and has such eccentric characters who contradict themselves and a plot that is barely perceivable then that makes the book pretty subversive. Which is exactly why I think it is seen as so brilliant and why it garnered a number seven spot on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century list. Mind you, that is only two platforms below my beloved Lolita. But Catch-22 is not that genius. Notice I said good writing a couple sentences previous and not great writing. However, this is also not to say that Heller is not a great writer. I think he strained so hard to create these eccentric characters and ridiculous situations that his writing did not flow freely and naturally; consequently, it seems forced. On the other hand, there is distinctly different prose in certain paragraphs where he is writing seriously, without trying to be funny, and it comes off as beautiful, effortless writing. I really enjoyed these passages, though sparse, throughout the book and if you ever read this book I think they will definitely stand out. But as I said before, I think he was trying too hard to be funny (but he was successful at this!) and as a result good prose was forsaken. What was really annoying was the constant use of superfluous adverbs. It seemed like he was going out of his way to use big words to describe an action. Rarely would somebody say something without an unnecessarily large word describing how that person said it. But I’m more of a he said she said kind of guy and not a he vociferated she iterated kind of guy.

But that’s enough negativity. I did enjoy this book. I thought it funny but did not see its brilliance. Let’s talk more about the Modern Library. I would argue that Catch-22 is good the same way a Stephen King novel is good, however different they may be. Stephen King is extremely well-known and his books are loved and many have been turned into movies (The Shining, Carrie, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, etc.) But would you call him brilliant? I mean, the guy’s swimming in his own money so his books have to be somewhat good, but not one of them cracked the list and there was no backlash against this. I kinda see Catch-22 in the same light. It’s certainly good and a page-turner for most people, but I can’t fathom how its prose drops jaws the same way Lolita or The Great Gatsby does. As I mentioned earlier, it is only in those rarely seen paragraphs where Heller just seems to be writing, not trying to be funny or continue his onslaught of catch-22 situations, that he shows he’s worthy of discussion in the top 100. Let me repeat, this book is at number seven on a list which a Hemingway novel didn’t crack the top 40 (to my memory.). This is what keeps me up at night. I can fathom how Catch-22, as its cover claims, is a “classic bestseller” but should this 25-vaudeville-acts-stitched-together of a book really be considered a great literary achievement? Somebody throw Hemingway a friggin’ bone here.

With this book, war novel month has begun. This should be especially interesting because I just realized I’m going to be reading A Farewell to Arms.

One last thing... If you ever read Sideways Stories of Wayside School when you were little then Catch-22 is a lot like the grown-up version of that in how each chapter in both books focus on different completely eccentric characters in absolutely ridiculously situations. This is an amusing comparison.