#35 - For Whom The Bell Tolls

So after a 6-month break to mission through Vanity Fair, I got to return to Mr. Ernest Hemingway, with For Whom The Bell Tolls. Coming 11 years after A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's writing style had definitely shifted from the beige prose I wrote about before. While the language is still dry, the sentences and paragraphs grew longer and more complex, with fewer clipped phrases. There were more digressions and asides, and more attention was paid to the inner monologues of not only Robert Jordan, our protagonist, but also a number of the other soldiers. (Right, plot summary: Robert Jordan is an American professor helping Spanish Communist guerrillas to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, by blowing up a bridge that is to be important in an upcoming battle. Hilarity ensues.) The broader writing was helped by the use of Old Castilian language for much of the dialogue - translated into English, it read as if they were speaking to each other extremely formally, with thee, thou and doest being scattered across a page. Expletives were also used quite well, with the foul-mouthed soldiers having their words tempered through translation and angry tirades seeming even stronger without the actual words being used. My personal favourite was "I obscenity in the milk of your mother", but that's just because I like how many different options it leaves. But other things were very much the same - the beginning and endings were both crafted to an exact goal, with one building the world and tones and the other bringing the pace down to a final still moment - and I'm glad they were, because in both books, they were beautifully done.

Another thing that remained the same was his treatment of women, and this is where I'm going to have to bring in some outside discussion. This article was posted: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/12/09/in_no_regrets_women_writers_talk_about_what_it_was_like_to_read_literature.html on my news feed, and being a good enlightened modern feminist man, I read and nodded along to the propagation of gender roles and inequality, but something still felt wrong. It specifically called out Hemingway, as well as Kerouac's On The Road, so it had clearly targeted a lot of books that I felt strongly about. So while I read this one, I wanted to try and see how it made me feel - towards women, and everything else. Lots of it was there - the love interest of the book, Maria, only lived to serve Robert, falling head over heels for him and seeming to exist only to let Robert examine his feelings on having a woman close to the battlefield. She wasn't treated as a person, and her rich back story was used as a starting point for more investigation of Robert. Unlike inner monologues from Robert, Anselmo, El Sordo, and more, there was no attempt to have her voice (or the voice of Pilar, the strong-willed older woman) drive the narrative. This was also the case with the creepy romance found in A Farewell to Arms, so I looked at some more of the similarities between the women. They were both women who were damaged by traumatic experiences (a lost husband and sexual abuse), they were both in vulnerable positions near a war front, and they both were obsessed with saying and doing whatever it took to please men that they loved, which they did within the first couple of meetings. Hemingway, very clearly, didn't understand these women - he says as much in A Farewell to Arms - but he was fascinated by them, and so incorporated them into his story as they affected him, as objects that influenced without being seen as equal, and as stories that were told to him by them. To have tried to create some sort of equal narrative between men and women in the book would have detracted from the single most important point of not only Hemingway's, but arguably any writer - to describe the "truth" as they see it, as purely and as clearly as possible. If women today feel excluded from the literary canon, it's because they were excluded. Hemingway didn't understand the women in his life, just as many female writers today don't seem to understand the men in theirs.

I'm already running over my optimal length for one of these, so I'll just skip to the ending - literally. The 43rd and last chapter of the book runs some 40 pages, a sizable chunk of the total length of 471. It runs continuously through the battle, and (SPOILERS aw who gives a crap if you're this far in you've probably read it and if not I've given you more than enough time to click away from the page go on click click away!) as it comes to the finish, I have never felt so immersed, in a cinematic sense, with the scene. It certainly helped that as I read about the horses galloping across the road, and the tearful goodbye, my sister was playing Let It Be on a tiny music box from her stocking. It got even more perfect as the family left the car and walked up to my grandmother's, leaving me sitting in the cold car as I read the last four pages, my body getting chilled as he waited for the end. And as I read about the standoff, I saw my breath hang in the air, listened to the stillness of a Canadian winter, and then closed the book. Dammit Hemingway, you did it again. Merry Christmas 2013, you son of the great whore.

10/10

#34 - Vanity Fair

Right off the bat, let's settle some things. Vanity Fair is a magazine currently in its fifth iteration as a magazine, with 2 British editions and 2 American editions coming before the current American edition, which started in 1983. The 4th iteration, the 2nd American edition, actually merged with and was absorbed by what remains today as Vogue. Before the first magazine was produced, there was this book, Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray. But the origin of all of these Vanity Fairs is the original, a setting in the John Bunyan book Pilgrim's Progress (#44 on my list), in which travelers are distracted by a never-ending festival of all of the worldly enjoyments of life, keeping them from moving further along the moral road. Thackeray's Vanity Fair is set in Napoleonic Britain, providing a very interesting contrast with Tolstoy's War and Peace, approaching from the East. The upper-crust society that Thackeray describes is filled with nepotism, alcoholics, superficiality and hypocrisy, all as part of his scathing social critique on the nobility of the time. With this, Thackeray established himself as one of the most popular writers of the era, matched only by Charles Dickens, whose fame has lasted significantly better.

Speaking of Dickens, this novel suffers from the same tragic flaw as both Dickensian works and War and Peace - it was published in serial form. Now, Tolstoy used the opportunity to expand the world he was writing in to epic proportions, but Thackeray instead used it to recite his favourite moral lectures and toss asides to friends and readers into the main thrust of the story. I've always disliked the style forced by the serial format, but here is the first place where I've truly wondered if it could remove artistic quality from the piece, and I think is does. Vanity Fair could have been one of my top books ever, but it should not be 951 pages (in my Wordsworth Classics edition, published 1992), not even close. With a team of good editors and a machete, this manuscript could have been easily reduced to 400, maybe as low as 250 pages, and the effects would have been so much purer. I'm not advocating Fitzgerald-like wordsmithing, but I am being convinced more and more that every word needs to have a purpose to belong on the page (I know, this is one of my wordiest and sloppiest reviews, but it's been a long semester).

That all said, there was true genius in the book, and that was in the clarity of his character work. The foibles, so important to his satire, were just realistic enough to keep the pressure on the message behind it. The subtitle of Vanity Fair is A Novel Without A Hero, but readers have since argued that that statement is purposefully gendered - implying that the Hero-ine is one of the two main female leads, Amelia Osborne (nee Sedley) or Rebecca "Becky" Crawley (nee Sharp). The pair are wonderful opposites, and both are enviable roles, which may be why there have been half a dozen adaptations of the book. Amelia is sweet and innocent and gentle, while Becky is clever and talented and determined. Becky's skills at satire, seduction and society mask a deeper, almost psychopathic disregard for other people. In fact, some interpretations go so far as to suggest she may have murdered another character in the close of the book. But many of the adaptations go out of their way to justify Becky's actions as a child of poverty whose drive for financial stability is understandable, even laudable. Personally, while I find Becky a compellingly twisted villainess, I wouldn't go as far as describing her as evil - were she born into luxury, she'd be no worse than a Daisy Buchanan. Amelia, on the other hand, I find more challenging. Her naivete and lack of subtext appears as warm and genuine, but in the end is entirely weak, vapid and simply...not worth the time. Dobbin, who longs for her as a "girl-on-pedestal" for much of the book, says as much in one of the book's best passages, of which there were many.

And there were many, and there was plenty of other great stuff too. But because Thackeray had to fill 20 issues of a magazine, he surrounded it with loads of filler, and because of that, what could have been a back-to-back 10/10 is instead receiving a -2 mark for being written in a stupid era/format, giving it:

8/10