Hi, so I wanted to know your thoughts on the book, why it was so phenomenal etc.
I finished it a while ago and was very underwhelmed. Recently I’ve seen so many good reviews about the book and I’m afraid I missed the entire point of the book or I’m just too immature and young to have understood it. I’ve read Sun also rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Man and the Sea, and his other short stories and loved them. I just can’t see why AFTA is sometimes even called to be his best novel.
Here are some of the notes I had written promptly after finishing:
* I feel like m/c is an average man going through war and ended up with a subaverage life.
* He’s so gray-area-ish it’s hard to grow attached. Book felt like an honorless, watered down version of Bell Tolls.
* The entire novel was very gritty. It all felt like a detailed and real accounting of an average man going through war. Because of it there is a nagging melancholia hanging in the air, and unlike his other novels with beautiful bittersweetness or touching resolve that delights the reader and gives the book its commercial? enjoyment, i felt like this book dragged the exhausting discomfort throughout the book and even furthered it with the ending. But this is strange because I like these things; I like dreary, gritty reality in plot. can’t find perfect example but i loved Sun Also Rises or The Stranger. I just can’t figure out why this book was so unfavorable for me.
* The end of AFtA was tragic but not truly so, it was hopeless, but not in a graphic way; rather in a way that makes you slowly decompose into an empty shell of a life. It was quiet, toned down, dulled, and realistic. So when I finished the book it left an unpleasant aftertaste which I disliked, and I usually enjoy lingering emotions, even negative ones.
by Middle-Presence-9429
2 Comments
I think a factor here may be that not all readers think books are better if they have “delightful moments that give commercial enjoyment”, or worse if they have negative endings. A realistic and negative portrayal of war was also uncommon at the time (and Hemingway himself was an ambulance driver in WW1, so that aspect at least has a note of autobiography to it that makes it interesting to modern readers interested in Hemingway).
Sounds like you understood it perfectly well to me.