Review: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

This is a very wonderful collection of memories, perhaps tainted by the biased lens through which Hemingway - and really anyone for that matter - learns to see the past, rendering people and himself differently than many supposedly impartial online articles. One could argue that it is a deceptive tale, not really an autobiography that paints the self with the elementary colors of Truth, aimed at self-deprecation. Frankly, I would rather be deceived by a narrator with charm, who has reconciled himself with the past and thereby attained a new truth that is almost truer than the truth he has lived. After all, if there is Truth in itself, it is unattainable by any human observer, so the next best truth is the subjective and partial one we all hold in the jewel cases of our thoughts.

What Hemingway writes is this second truth about his young days in Paris, truth seen through his memories and not taken from some universal cosmic log that keeps track of every event and thought on our foolish earth. His language, though deliberately aimed for impartial simplicity, betrays nostalgia and resignation that caught up with him only later in life. When I read this, I want to knock on wood too:

"Poor everybody," Hadley said. "Rich feathercats with no money."

"We are awfully lucky."

"We`ll have to be good and hold it."

We both touched wood on the cafe table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this cafe table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

He suggests that only luck keeps happiness for us, and without it, many chances to one, we shall perish, led by momentary infatuation, by stepping off a cliff . One cannot have everything, and in the desire to gain the world, loses all. Here I bow to the rule of reason, but perhaps once in a while it gets overthrown by bands of ragged impulses: "When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully..." And one can feel, how fatally irreversible life is. But one tends to value more that, which is fragile, and so we do.
Hemingway writes: "But I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself." And this applies to happiness as well, except noone can find anything better to fill the space with.

There are also many interesting thoughts about creation and writing and a few anecdotal recollections of notable people. He speaks of hunger as a good discipline, from which one learns, and perhaps he is right. I learn from it too, from different forms of hunger. He speaks of them too. Physical hunger, hunger for recognition, hunger to work, hunger for that which one cannot have. Hadley, Hemingway's first wife, says in the novel that "Memory is hunger." A Moveable Feast is perhaps an attempt to appease that kind of hunger.

The memoir describes Scott Fitzgerald's life with some melancholy details that make me wish it were a bit more stable and left us with another Great Gasby. Though, if he were not a dreamer with days submerged with champaigne, there would probably be no Great Gasby. By some accounts, Fitzgerald stole some writing from his wife, but Hemingway describes her as a selfish woman, jealous of her husband's work.

I wonder, does one have to have problems to be a great writer, or does one acquire them in the process?

Review: Camus, The Stranger

Stylistically, the book is excellent. Impassive, strikingly short statements of the first-person narrator reveal Mersault’s understanding of the world and the world itself better than any omniscient narrator could (e.g. what could describe a person better than: “Over his bed he has a pink-and-white plaster angel, some pictures of famous athletes, and two or three photographs of naked women.” ?)

Through Mersault, Camus autopsies a candid case of the paralysis of emotion, that far more people experience than are prepared to admit: “It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing has changed.(p.24) … I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or anther all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead. Here the lawyer interrupted me and he seemed very upset.(p.65)” The horror of onlookers at Mersault’s trial, therefore, appears exceedingly hypocritical. Mersault is an exaggeration of the choiceless existence that many lead unawares, the existence of wood chips swaying in the waves of circumstances. Thus, in retrospect, the phrase: “It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot” is one of the novel’s messages, a much less obvious one than it seems. Following the verdict, Mersault’s musings about the nature of capital punishment and the lack of even infinitesimal hope is, in content, nearly identical to the passage in the opening pages of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot”, but completely opposed to it in feeling.

“The Stranger” is not a pessimistic statement about the state of the world, but rather a reminder to preserve the tenderness of heart and the precision of perspective, that would allow us to distinguish what really is so important in life to make one desperate to retain it.

Review: Bradbury, Martian Cronicles

As a collection of sketches for all the works an artist will create in his lifetime, this is both great and mildly disappointing: there is almost too much of Bradbury revealed in this book. It is as though somebody wrote one of these "Very Short Introductions" to Brudbury in a brilliant fiction format. The ideas to note and cherish are:
- Humans (especially Americans) tend to overlegislate and over-politically-correct to the point of ridiculous: dread the book burning (also Farenheit 451).
- When we cannot have the truth, the dream is the next best thing and many will deliberately turn their faces to make dream seemreal (i.e. pretend a hypnotist martian is your resurrected son).
- Our approach to God (say, a Christian one) is inevitably short-sighted in the context of larger universe (for what is Jesus for Martians? what is sin for someone without flesh?).
- Emigrant's feeling for his motherland would be a thousand times multiplied in an earth-man come to Mars. If the war started, we would all go home.
- There's little one would not do out of loneliness (hypnotic Martian putting on different identities).
- How good we are at destroying the precious castles of history built on foreign lands (e.g. Martian castles, Baghdad castles)!
- AI may have just as much right for life, as we, supposedly non-AI beings, but does it have a reason to be? Is its laughter meaningless, if we planted it there? Who knows if a soul is really anithing to pay attention to.
- Technology that attempts to replace the basic essence of our existence is short-sighted, because a) it will appear ridiculous when we vanish (no people around, but cook breakfast nonetheless), b) we will appear ridiculous if it vanishes (what happened to the self-cooked breakfast?), c) it may create unforeseen disasters - psychological, physical, it may upturn the meaning of being human that each of us kindles in his heart. (also, The Veldt, in Illustrated Man).

Altogether wonderful with lush imagination and seed-like thruths that may soon sprout. Whatever shall we do then?