Bookstorm

Maybe it was the early hour, but this passage, from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, struck me as ridiculously funny melodrama, with its weird macho/homoerotic overtones:

Then the Giant came up, and Mr. Great-heart went to meet him; and as he went, he drew his Sword, but the Giant had a club. So without more ado they fell to it, and at the first blow the Giant struck Mr. Great-heart down upon one of his knees; with that the women and children cried out: So Mr. Great-heart recovering himself laid about him in full lusty manner, and gave the Giant a wound in his arm; thus he fought for the space of an hour, to that height of heat, that the breath came out of the Giant's nostrils, as the heat doth out of a boiling cauldron.

Then they sat down to rest them, but Mr. Great-heart betook them to prayer; also the women and children did nothing but sigh and cry all the time that the battle did last.

When they had rested them, and taken breath, they fell to it again, and Mr. Great-heart with a full blow fetch'd the Giant down to the ground: Nay, hold, and let me recover, quoth he. So Mr. Great-heart fairly let him get up: So to it they went again, and the Giant missed but little of all-to-breaking Mr. Great-heart's skull with his club.

Mr. Great-heart seeing that, runs to him with the full heat of his spirit, and pierced him under the fifth rib; with that the Giant began to faint, and could hold up his club no longer. Then Mr. Great-heart seconded his blow, and smit the head of the Giant from his shoulders. Then the women and children rejoiced, and Mr. Great-heart also praised God, for the deliverance he had wrought.

As women might say, with a sigh and an eye-roll: Boys.

I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby three years ago, while living in Colorado, and while I don't remember much about it, I do remember being terribly unimpressed. I like to tell people that it's the most over-rated book in American literature, at best, a literary curiosity that captures a particular moment in history: in this case, the excess of the Jazz Age. This isn't to say that Fitzgerald wasn't talented, or that the book is a complete waste of time--no, for all its nuances and subtlety and tight structure, The Great Gatsby is boring. My initial reaction to it was one of complete indifference.

I've always felt that I should revisit The Great Gatsby, if only to pay closer attention to it. I've always enjoyed tragedy, so you'd think I would've enjoyed The Great Gatsby the first time around. Sure, it's entirely possible that it suffers from heightened expectations: if this is one of the greatest novels ever written, it better be damned-near flawless, and engaging, and most of all, memorable. I don't care to learn how Fitzgerald actually wrote the book (and this, it seems, is a big reason why novelists have so much respect for The Great Gatsby)--no, I want to be told a good, well-written story, with a few breathtaking passages and a little insight. Sadly, The Great Gatsby struck me as a book with no meat, a book so bone-dry that the sense of boredom is numbing.

But The Great Gatsby has always fascinated me, simply because I don't understand why it should be required reading, and why no home library is complete without it. I no longer have the urge to ask people why I'm supposed to like it, but I've long suspected that there was something I missed the first time. (Or maybe I didn't miss anything--my indifference may be due to something as simple and seemingly innocuous as my mood.) We'll see how things go this time.

What the hell am I doing on Twitter? I can barely keep the blog up-to-date.

Ryan and I like to talk about moving to Paris and working in a bakery. She promises that she won't get caught eating the product, and I tell her that I can only cover for her for a certain time before things get out of hand. "And! Then we'll transport the product, but we'll take it in equal measure, so no one product looks too empty." Sounds reasonable enough, I tell her, but what if she's caught eating bread and cake, thereby getting us both fired from the bakery? "No worries--I'm good at surreptitiously stuffing my face." We'll brush up on our French and get visas and then be on our way.

This is only a preamble to A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's literary memoir of 1920s Paris. It's not one of Hemingway's best books, and certainly not a memoir in the classic sense--it's really just a bunch of short, irreverent vignettes, in which Hemingway recounts meeting with the various literary giants living in post-World War I Paris: there's Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and, in the centerpiece of the book, F. Scott Fitzgerald, among smaller, lesser-known luminaries. (One of the most amusing scenes comes during after Hemingway has finished drinking with Ford: "'That's Hilaire Belloc,' I said to my friend. 'Ford was here this afternoon and cut him dead.' 'Don't be a silly ass,' my friend said. 'That's Alestair Crowley, the diabolist. He's supposed to be the wickedest man in the world.'")

Though Hemingway began A Moveable Feast in 1957, it reads as though he'd recorded the events and conversations as they happened. The style is classic Hemingway: spare and unsentimental, even self-deprecating, with Hemingway showcasing his rule to create (or, in this case, recreate), rather than describe. Even without concrete times or settings--the little stories are never conclusively dated--Hemingway, using the language of the era, still evokes the mood of Paris, transporting to a place that's inspiring and mythical. Here, we're given a Hemingway who's naive and enthusiastic, a young man sure of his talent but unsure of his voice. This is a far cry from the Papa Hemingway of later years, the older man consumed by alcoholism, a fiery temper, and suicidal depression. A Moveable Feast reveals Hemingway at his most vulnerable--he doesn't take center stage, but like the characters in his fiction, we're still offered glimpses of a tragic man who lived one of the most amazing lives in American letters.