7 reactions
Just finished Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, and it's a wild ride
As the title states I just finished Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (1937), having previously read In Our Time (1925), The Torrents of Spring (1926), The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). I found this one to be a very slow start, and pretty conventional by Hemingway standards, including some obtuse dialogue and scene-setting, and a lot of fishing vernacular. But as the story goes on, Hemingway employs some pretty interesting and strange, if inconsistent, narrative techniques that I really enjoyed. I also found that the book was very different from Hemingway's other works that I've read in the following ways:
* While I typically relate to Hemingway's main characters and find them to be decent people, Harry Morgan is, to me, a deeply conflicted and flawed man. He seems decent in some parts of the book, but is spurred on by economic necessity (or so he rationalizes) to do some crazy stuff. The conflict, to me, was presented partially during a perspective shift that Hemingway uses for one chapter, in which he lets a man named Albert's thoughts dictate the narration.
* The book being set in depression-era Havana and Key West, Hemingway really delves deeply and explicitly into social commentary on poverty, which reminded me of Steinbeck's The Pearl and The Grapes of Wrath.
* Hemingway uses third-person omniscient voice in a scene near the end of the book, in which he provides vignettes of different people staying in yachts in a dock on Key West. This part felt pretty boldly experimental, and I have to assume that it seems more normal to modern readers than it would have to readers at the time. It's also extremely dark, in ways that are similar to, but distinct from A Farewell to Arms. While A Farewell to Arms deals with war in a very frank way, and also grief generally, suicide is a topic that is visited a few times in To Have and Have Not.
I'm sure there are other differences between this and his other works, and I'm curious to read For Whom the Bell Tolls to see how similar it may be to this one, but these were just some things that I noticed, and which made the book powerful and thought-provoking to me. At the same time, I recognize that a lot of people dislike this book, so for those that did, I'm curious to know why. Did the different narrative techniques used feel disorganized? Did some of the vignettes and side characters feel irrelevant or distracting?
I'm also curious to know where people personally rank this in the Hemingway pantheon. I probably still like The Sun Also Rises the Most, followed by A Farewell to Arms, closely followed by this, and then followed by The Old Man and the Sea.
As the title states I just finished Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (1937), having previously read In Our Time (1925), The Torrents of Spring (1926), The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). I found this one to be a very slow start, and pretty conventional by Hemingway standards, including some obtuse dialogue and scene-setting, and a lot of fishing vernacular. But as the story goes on, Hemingway employs some pretty interesting and strange, if inconsistent, narrative techniques that I really enjoyed. I also found that the book was very different from Hemingway's other works that I've read in the following ways:
* While I typically relate to Hemingway's main characters and find them to be decent people, Harry Morgan is, to me, a deeply conflicted and flawed man. He seems decent in some parts of the book, but is spurred on by economic necessity (or so he rationalizes) to do some crazy stuff. The conflict, to me, was presented partially during a perspective shift that Hemingway uses for one chapter, in which he lets a man named Albert's thoughts dictate the narration.
* The book being set in depression-era Havana and Key West, Hemingway really delves deeply and explicitly into social commentary on poverty, which reminded me of Steinbeck's The Pearl and The Grapes of Wrath.
* Hemingway uses third-person omniscient voice in a scene near the end of the book, in which he provides vignettes of different people staying in yachts in a dock on Key West. This part felt pretty boldly experimental, and I have to assume that it seems more normal to modern readers than it would have to readers at the time. It's also extremely dark, in ways that are similar to, but distinct from A Farewell to Arms. While A Farewell to Arms deals with war in a very frank way, and also grief generally, suicide is a topic that is visited a few times in To Have and Have Not.
I'm sure there are other differences between this and his other works, and I'm curious to read For Whom the Bell Tolls to see how similar it may be to this one, but these were just some things that I noticed, and which made the book powerful and thought-provoking to me. At the same time, I recognize that a lot of people dislike this book, so for those that did, I'm curious to know why. Did the different narrative techniques used feel disorganized? Did some of the vignettes and side characters feel irrelevant or distracting?
I'm also curious to know where people personally rank this in the Hemingway pantheon. I probably still like The Sun Also Rises the Most, followed by A Farewell to Arms, closely followed by this, and then followed by The Old Man and the Sea.
| 43,000 mlx | |
| 25 | |
| 7 |