The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

Started January 11 - Finished January 13, 2002; 480 pages. Posted 14 January 2002

Back when I first went back to school I got it into my head that I should read "The Classics" so I would have some reference when they were brought up, as they invariably were. After finishing Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" (which was great), I went on to read "The Great Gatsby" which I couldn't stand and then read "Crime and Punishment" which I thought was a mediocre murder mystery with some moderately interesting devices to it.

"Fuck the classics," I said, and went back to reading what I wanted to.

But old habits die hard, and for some reason, I decided I should read some Ernest Hemingway. I already knew I didn't like the man himself. He was a macho tough guy who hunted every animal he can think of, and then shot himself after he felt he couldn't write anymore (although there are strong allegations that his various girlfriends did most of the writing for him). He had what I call the "teased as a child for having a stupid name" syndrome, acting out the later years trying to show how manly he was, like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I got news for these guys: you're not fooling anybody. Now gimme your lunch money.

And for such a tough guy, Ernest is doing something rather odd here. This was published in 1940 and I don't know what obscenity laws were like at the time. Ernest has the characters swearing up a storm, but he won't write the actual curse word. What this means is you have paragraph after paragraph of dialogue like, "I obscenity in your unprintable obscenity hat, you obscenity unprintable obscenity obscenity.

Doesn't that look idiotic? That's what I thought as well. It seems to me that a stronger writer would be able to think of other forms of cursing, like what Shakespeare and B. Traven did with their works.

Another thing: this is set somewhere in Mexico, and as most people know, Spanish has words for the formal and the informal. Hemingway apparently decided his characters (made of revolutionaries, both Spanish and American) would be speaking in the formal manner, so he translates it as such. What this means is it comes off like this: "Thou canst eat my unprintable, for thee and thine are nothing more than obscenity that I wipe from my unprintable."

It's just fucking goofy. Oh, I'm sorry, it's just unprintably goofy. Maybe I'm being a little hard, though. The actual novel was not bad (although I fell asleep three times while trying to finish it). It's just the style that bothered me.

Fuck the classics.


Rating: I just said I fell asleep three times while trying to finish this. How good can it be? Pay flea market prices.

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