Current obsession: Ernest
Hemingway
It started with my watching a
BBC documentary on Hemingway’s travels, Hemingway
Adventure, where Michael Palin revisited the places and passions that
defined Hemingway and his works. Those places include Chicago and Michigan, his
birthplace and childhood haunts; Italy in WWI, where his experiences as a volunteer Red
Cross ambulance driver became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms; Spain, where he translated his experiences into
a manifesto on bullfighting, Death in the
Afternoon, the novel For Whom the
Bell Tolls, and the propaganda film Spanish
Earth; Africa, which inspired The
Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Green
Hills of Africa; Florida’s Key West where they continue to hold annual Papa
Hemingway lookalike contests; Cuba where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which won him the 1954 Nobel Prize for
literature; and the American West where he spent his last days in search of
peace and solitude.
As the show took me to the
places where Hemingway has been, I sensed that same jolt of excitement I felt
when I first encountered Hemingway’s work, For
Whom the Bell Tolls, eighteen years ago. He got me then. I became an
instant fan. And as I learn more about Hemingway, my regard for his work and
his attitude towards life has turned into something akin to an obsession. Watching the HBO movie Hemingway and Gellhorn did not help either: it just increased my
fascination with the man.
I can talk for hours and days
about Hemingway and his novels, but I confine myself to just writing about him,
instead. Who would listen to a lengthy discourse on the author, anyway? Not
even my friends would. My colleagues haven’t even heard of him. And they are not interested in a dead guy who’s famous for writing a story about an old
fisherman who had gone 84 days without catching a fish.
2 comments:
Interesting stuff. Hemingway wrote some inspirational stuff.
Sounds like a great author and interesting tales he spun. Hope I catch up on some of his works here.
Wish you a happy week ahead Angeli:)
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