What do you think Hemingway's Best Fiction is?

his bull fighting documentary, 'Death in the Afternoon' and some of his Bylines (newspaper stories). The two I enjoy the most are 'The Sun Also Rises' (fiction) and 'A Moveable Feast' (autobiographical about his early days in Paris). I believe that which works you like the best is determined by the stage of life you are at when you read him. The 'Sun also...' is the best Hemingway dramatization of any of his works. Most of his stories were poorly done by Hollywood, but this one actually pretty well follows the book. Tyrone Power is a great Jake, and so is Ava Gardmer as Lady Bret. The supporting players are very good also: Errol Flynn, Eddie Albert, Audrey Hepburns' first husband whose name I can't remember. Hemingway is one of the great authors of the 20th cnetury. It is foolish and inane to dismiss him for some ill defined feminist reason, Great literature should not be ignored since ir leaves a definite gap in your reading. What the heck, I like Jane Austen, and I have read 'Gone with the Wind' twice. Don't let your emotions overcome the enjoyment most get out of Papa Hemingway.

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Originally Posted by Neely

I wouldn't rate Hemingway as highly as you obviously do but I do think he is a good writer and have read several of his works, though not the short story you mentioned. From the novels I would say that A Moveable Feast followed by Fiesta are easily better than his other novels.

I prefer Hemingway in these two works because for me he writes better when he is not trying to write fiction too much. In other words the more biographical his work the better I find it, strangely. I feel that in his other novels Green Hills of Africa, A Farewell to Arms For Whom the Bell Tolls etc, that he is trying to force things a little, whereas I prefer him in a more natural tone which is how I take the first two I mentioned.

Granted it has been a couple of years since I read Hemingway (apart from A Moveable Feast as I read that every year) but this is my take on Hemingway.

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I rate Hemingway about the same as you Neely. His novels are not the cream of the crop, but I do think his body of work with the short stories is as good as anyone. I also thin A Moveable Feast is a great work. Interesting you read it every year.

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Originally Posted by The Comedian

Interesting take on Hemingway, Neely. I like Hemingway, though, I must admit that I like him less and less as I get older. Still, the work of his that shines above the rest is The Sun Also Rises.

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The same thing has happened with me. The older I get, the less the novels impress. I do think that The Sun Also Rises is his best and perhaps only classic. However, the shear beauty of his prose in A Farewell To Arms should be noted.

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Originally Posted by mono

Do any other of my fellow Hemingway-ians suggest what I should read next?

I think this says a lot about Hemingway - a very masculine man, but a very sensitive individual.
Women can often get portrayed as weak dependents in his novels, I agree, and, in the words of that silly woman in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the man will often function as the head in every plot of his novels, but the woman functions as the neck, and turns his head every direction.

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I recommend his Collected Short Stories Mono as next. He was actually more sensitive than he lets on and people think. I think you hit on Hemingway's female characters. They are essentially cartoons. They are extremely two dimensional. They are not real. At least not for me.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

What's wrong with that? Men don't have to hate Jane Austen just because her books are oriented more toward feminine issues. Masculinity is a point of view and a valid one. As Jerry Holkins recently wrote "Eventually, we'll come to understand that the universe is wide enough to contain ideas which do not pertain to us." Something may be quite good which is nevertheless not our cup of tea, and feminist or not, Hemingway is arguably the greatest prose stylist of the English language.

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Very good. I agree. We read Jane Austen and the Brontes and we don't complain about how feminine they are. :D

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Originally Posted by JBI

Yes, but one could argue that Hemingway enforces and projects a sense of ideal masculinity that has become dated to our society. I wouldn't dismiss the books on those grounds, but I would acknowledge that that is somewhat founded criticism. His attacks on Fitzgerald, for instance, for being too womanly, illustrate a sense of Macho, patriarchal masculinity, that one can argue is a negative construct.

One doesn't even need to be a feminist to critique him - one could argue that his view of masculinity is harmful to males, as it enforces a male ideal identity.

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I don't see the problem with him being dated. For God's sake do we criticize Chaucer for being out dated in his values? That's all relative. My problem with his masculinity is that at times, when he's forcing it (as someone above characterizes it) it's not real. It comes across as dishonest. But who am I to say if it's honest or not.

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That being said, I personally like a few of his books. The Sun Also Rises namely, and his Short Stories. As for greatest Prose stylist, one of the better ones, certainly, but I am reluctant to use the term greatest anywhere, especially since style, if good, is always idiosyncratic, and hard to compare.

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I think we completely agree in that assessment. :)

Much of the work of Ernest Hemingway belongs geographically to Europe and Africa: the background of A Farawell to Arms is Caporetto. This is I believe his most charactersitic work despite that I much prefer his Islands in the Stream, a very simple, impressive novel about which noone talked thus far. Many, however, prefer Death in the Afternoon, a bull-fighting masterpiece, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Neely wrote:

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I wouldn't rate Hemingway as highly as you obviously do but I do think he is a good writer and have read several of his works, though not the short story you mentioned. From the novels I would say that A Moveable Feast followed by Fiesta are easily better than his other novels.

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Virgil wrote:

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I rate Hemingway about the same as you Neely. His novels are not the cream of the crop, but I do think his body of work with the short stories is as good as anyone. I also thin A Moveable Feast is a great work. Interesting you read it every year.

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Hemigway's laconic sentences (indeed, they are all painfully compact) and air of half-callous detachment that goes along with a very fine sensitiveness towards women and nature, his observe of sentimentality -- all have a great influence on me. These qualities I believe make him one of the greatest in history.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

What's wrong with that? Men don't have to hate Jane Austen just because her books are oriented more toward feminine issues.

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Yes, but Austen is criticising her gender, and her style isn't overly feminine. Hemingway's is too macho and unpoetic- as in if a man looks at a tree, he just writes 'The man was looking at a tree.' I can't read like that.

I had a pretty tough time reading Hemingway this term. I read A Farewell to Arms, and I came so close to not finishing it more than once. No offense to any Hemingway fans, but he's boring! Too much details, and even if I tried to skip certain parts (something I only started doing with Hemingway) I feel that I'll be skipping the whole novel. There's no beauty about his writing, his dialogues didn't even make sense at times. His fans probably see something that I couldn't see, but I don't think I'll be reading any of his books any time soon.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

Yes, but Austen is criticising her gender, and her style isn't overly feminine. Hemingway's is too macho and unpoetic- as in if a man looks at a tree, he just writes 'The man was looking at a tree.' I can't read like that.

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I would disagree that his prose is unpoetic. It may not be overly descriptive like Faulkner's, but if by poetic, we mean the careful choosing of each and every word, Hemingway is poetic to the extreme.

The way you use poetic, however, I take to mean ethereal, beautiful, and lyrical. That is the way I usually mean poetic. In this case, I might point you toward the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms which simply describes valleys, streams, and mountains. Hemingway's prose is often fantastically poetic when dealing with nature - especially in The Sun Also Rises, when man can only really be himself in nature, and outside of the city. Take Jacob Barnes baptismal leap into the water near the end of the novel.

As for his work being overly macho. I'm on the fence. His male characters are almost always stoic and enduring, while his female characters are underdrawn and submissive. Nearly all of his male characters drink a fairly large amount of alcohol in any one sitting and often avoid talking about their feelings.

However, since one of the main themes of The Sun Also Rises is the repression of emotion to a subconscious level - and as the novel presents this as not necessarily a good thing - I could not describe Hemingway (at least in this novel) as specifically overly masculine.

The prose is not unpoetic. There are times Hemingway rises to shear peotry. Here's a passage I just pulled out of The Sun Also Riese:

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We packed the lunch and two bottles of wine in the rucksack,
and Bill put it on. I carried the rod-case and the landing-nets
slung over my back. We started up the road and then went across
a meadow and found a path that crossed the fields and went
toward the woods on the slope of the first hill. We walked across
the fields on the sandy path. The fields were rolling and grassy
and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. The cattle were
up in the hills. We heard their bells in the woods.

The path crossed a stream on a foot-log. The log was surfaced
off, and there was a sapling bent across for a rail. In the flat pool
beside the stream tadpoles spotted the sand. We went up a steep
bank and across the rolling fields. Looking back we saw Burguete,
white houses and red roofs, and the white road with a truclc going
along it and the dust rising.

Beyond the fields we crossed another faster-flowing stream. A
sandy road led down to the ford and beyond into the woods. The
path crossed the stream on another foot-log below the ford, and
joined the road, and we went into the woods.

It was a beech wood and the trees were very old. Their roots
bulked above the ground and the branches were twisted. We
walked on the road between the thick trunks of the old beeches
and the sunlight came through the leaves in light patches on the
grass. The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not
gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very
green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it
were a park.

"This is country" Bill said.

The road went up a hill and we got into thick woods, and the
road kept on climbing. Sometimes it dipped down but rose again
steeply. All the time we heard the cattle in the woods. Finally,
the road came out on the top of the hills. We were on the top of
the height of land that was the highest part of the range of
wooded hills we had seen from Burguete. There were wild straw-
berries growing on the sunny side of the ridge in a little clearing
in the trees.

Ahead the road came out of the forest and went along the
shoulder of the ridge of hills. The hills ahead were not wooded,
and there were great fields of yellow gorse. Way off we saw the
steep bluffs, dark with trees and jutting with gray stone, that
marked the course of the Irati River.

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I'm surprised so many people favor The Sun Also Rises. I'm also surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned The Old Man and the Sea, which I personally think is his best work.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

Yes, but Austen is criticising her gender, and her style isn't overly feminine. Hemingway's is too macho and unpoetic- as in if a man looks at a tree, he just writes 'The man was looking at a tree.' I can't read like that.

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That's exactly what I like in Hemingway. No single overt romanticism. No hyperbolic sentence structure. If one wants to be poetic, let him/her write poetry.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

The prose is not unpoetic. There are times Hemingway rises to shear peotry. Here's a passage I just pulled out of The Sun Also Riese:

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But that reads like a complicated map. Apart from the 'This is country' part, I can't see anything poetic in there.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

But that reads like a complicated map. Apart from the 'This is country' part, I can't see anything poetic in there.

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I'm with you Kelby. I think Hemingway would be the last writer whose works I would ever willingly pick up.

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Originally Posted by wessexgirl

I'm with you Kelby. I think Hemingway would be the last writer whose works I would ever willingly pick up.

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And I would probably be the last person to pick up a Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, or Harlequin Romance book. I'm just not the intended audience for those novels. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to brushing my hair in the mirror, listening to Enya, and practice putting on my makeup so it doesn't smudge.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

But that reads like a complicated map. Apart from the 'This is country' part, I can't see anything poetic in there.

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I don't see what's so complicated about it. Looks rather simple to me. But whatever.

I have a love-hate thing with Hemmingway. I did not like his real life persona at all, so perhaps that influenced my feelings, but when I am able to put that aside and not think about him at all, I liked very much The Old Man and the Sea and Farewell to Arms because they get to the heart of issues and they seem rather able to embrace feelings commen to all man. Aside from that I choose not to think of him much.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

And I would probably be the last person to pick up a Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, or Harlequin Romance book. I'm just not the intended audience for those novels. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to brushing my hair in the mirror, listening to Enya, and practice putting on my makeup so it doesn't smudge.

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I would NEVER pick up ANY of those authors or genres either, so what are you trying to say?

Is the implication that because I'm a woman I would automatically go for that trash, and not a male writer? I read writers from both sexes. I just don't like Hemingway. I don't like his macho posturing, but that doesn't mean I don't like male authors.

And for the record, I don't listen to Enya, and don't need to practice putting my make-up on. I have been doing it for long enough to have it down pat. Make-up on and hair brushed in 5-10 minutes in the morning, and out of the door, without a worry all day about if its smudged. Dear me, I'll be drummed out of the sisterhood!

You seem to have a very old-fashioned image of the role of the sexes.

men= Hemingway= manly and deep, (obviously too deep for little old me, flutters eyelashes and simpers)

women= being girly and shallow, not enough of the old brain-power to understand the profundity of writers like Papa. We have to go for light and fluffy, or our brains might explode.