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Hemingway's bunch of obnoxious, wasteful drinking buddies doesn't seem quite so glamorous anymore. It's clearer now how impotent they all are (not just poor Jake with his unnamed WWI casualty), and how hollow the relationships are. The main "love" relationship, Jake and Brett's codependent talkfest, has even less reality in it than Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy Buchanan. What's clearer to me now too is that Hemingway never took the crew seriously, either. They're a collection of "almosts." Almost a novelist, almost a real journalist, almost a Lady, almost a civilized group traveling in sophisticated circles.
But they're not without charm--and that's probably the best thing Hemingway does. He takes a deeply unlikeable group of people, and makes their petty squabbles and one night stands seem like Important Plot Points. And his attention to the machoness of Spain and bullfighting has been caricatured and become oversimplified--but what people seem to lose is how well he does it. Like so many male writers, he (or Jake, anyway) can't talk about sex directly...but the same sensuous care comes out in the details.
[Random Sun Also Rises note: my copy is a battered one I bought used at the UConn CoOp way back when. The previous owner wrote all over it. She or he starts off the first few pages with a few valid points about Jake Barnes's sexual issues. Then the comments get rarer, and rarer. Eventually, there's a tiny, final note in the bottom corner of a page: "I *heart* Chris." Ah, UConn. Turning out the great literary minds. There are also a few comments in my own handwriting that I don't remember making, proving that I wasn't always the book jotting prude that I seem to be these days.]
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The book (extremely short, since nothing is added from the magazine piece except a couple of brief intros/analyses from Ross) is also a reflection on Ross's unique journalistic ability. She seems to have the talent of being the kid sister and the authority figure at the same time--something that was evident even when I saw her a couple years ago (at a surprisingly spry eighty years old) interviewing Robin Williams. When she goes, she'll take the last link to the spunky, pre-Tina Brown New Yorker with her, and it'll be incredibly sad. But she's still with us, so I'll save the pouring of the 40 for my homie for when the time is right.
Hemingway, as we all know, is not with us, so the least I can do is dig up his stuff every few years and pay my respects by looking at it with whatever small amounts of wisdom I've picked up in the meantime.
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