Knowing when to give up on a book

In 2018 I wrote a blog called “Thank God for Novels” about rereading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and loving it: “. . . that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism, suicide, and death.”

Yesterday, in 2021, I quit rereading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms about a third of the way through. The only reason I was rereading this book, which as I recall I didn’t like in the first place, is because I recently watched the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary and got really angry at one of the talking heads in the film, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and essayist. In the film Llosa talks about how much he loved A Farewell to Arms—Hemingway’s “best novel”—and how much he hated For Whom the Bell Tolls—sentimental crap. I knew the real reason he didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it still made me furious that he got to spew his prejudice out on camera. Llosa, who was once a “liberal” but became a “neoliberal,” didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls because he didn’t like its politics, not because of its love scenes.

So I decided to reread A Farewell to Arms to prove my case. It started out all right, with a beautiful description of the Italian/Austrian border town where the American protagonist is stationed as an ambulance driver in World War I for the Italian Army (based on Hemingway’s own experience). It quickly descended into Hemingwayesque: “I went down to the mess to eat. Then I went outside to see what was happening with the cars. The mechanics were working on them to get ready for the next attack.” These are my words, not Hemingway’s, but they could be his. Next the protagonist meets Catherine, the English nurse who turns the novel into a love story. Their conversation consists of nothing beyond themselves: getting to know each other (if you can call it that: there’s no background information about where they’re from, what they’ve done, except for her former boyfriend, who died in the war); falling in love (within a couple of days); getting pregnant; deserting from the army (Catherine does have a great line about that: “Darling (she always calls him “Darling”), please be sensible. It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian Army.”); dying in childbirth. Is this the precursor of autofiction?

I’d already set the book aside for a few days without a definitive decision about whether to continue. Then last night I was talking with John Nichols on the phone, whom I’d already talked with about the Hemingway documentary and Vargas Llosa, and told him I was reading A Farwell to Arms but was thinking of giving it up. He told me the only two pages he’d read were the first and last and then quoted from each: the dust on the tree trunks and leaves from the marching troops, on page one, and on the last page, “It was like saying goodby to a statue.” He gave me his blessing to quit.

Thank God for Novels

While I was rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls John McCain died and I found out that it was his favorite book. That was a bit discombobulating, but understandable within the context of war and heroism and all that good stuff Hemingway writes about. But Jesus, all the other stuff that Hemingway writes about in that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism suicide, and death.

Listening to just the stuff about war and heroism as applied to McCain for almost two solid weeks was a good lesson in reductive thinking. Because McCain, a hawk, war monger, misogynist, and neoconservative, was also one of the few Republicans who expressed any opposition to Trump, in death he became the untainted hero. Obama delivered one of the eulogies. All the Democrats spewed laudatory sound bites. All the mainstream news outlets ran patriotic story after story documenting his years as a tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam and his distinguished career in the Senate where he manufactured a reputation as a maverick—he had a contrarian streak that sometimes played out against his own team—despite never seeing a war he didn't like.

But I digress. For anyone who hasn't read Hemingway's book, or those of you who don't remember it that well, it's the story of the Spanish Civil War and a band of partizans assigned the task of blowing up a bridge as part of a larger offensive against the fascists. The story is told through the eyes of Robert Jordan, an American (the Spaniards refer to him as Inglés) who had been studying in Spain before joining the Republicans to fight the fascists. Hemingway takes 471 pages to tell what happens over the course of three days. That is what makes this novel so wonderful. While I digressed about John McCain, he digressed about everything possible pertaining to a small band of guerrillas living in a cave in the mountains caught up in a war that presaged an even more horrific fight against fascism that would engulf the world just a few years later.

Roberto (as he is lovingly called by Maria, the young woman rescued by the guerillas after her family is shot by the fascists) questions everything in his stream of consciousness and flashbacks: why is he here, who are these people, can they be trusted, who is he to question their trust, how has this war come to be, will the communists, anarchists, and Trotskyites destroy the movement with their internecine bickering, will he and Maria live to walk the fascist free streets of Madrid as husband and wife? Yet minute by minute, hour by hour he must focus on how he is going to blow up a bridge when the Republican offensive begins and then figure out how the hell they're all going to get down from the mountains to safety.

It was such a pleasure to read as a distraction from John McCain's death and Trump's rants and Brett Kavanaugh's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as the Republicans push through his nomination to the Supreme Court. This appointment is not made by Congress anymore; it's made by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which draws up the list of potential conservative nominees to present to the president who then chooses the one he thinks will fulfill all his promises made to his base: overturn or severely limit Roe v. Wade, protect the president from prosecution, limit government agencies from enacting environmental and safety regulation, etc. etc.

But again I digress. I guess it just goes to show that our attention is riveted by this unbelievably strange vortex that sucks us deeper into a world we never thought we'd witness, but upon analysis was barrelling along all the time setting us up for the Trumpster. But wait! Another bomb. Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a professor in California back when they were in high school. Another disgusting Republican conservative who not only wants to control women's bodies by policy but apparently by physical force as well. Good thing I started rereading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: about as different as you can get in so many ways from For Whom the Bell Tolls but so beautifully written and actually just as incisive a look into the human condition. No, Virginia, there's no Santa Claus, but there's still beauty in the world and I'm going to stay out of the vortex for two hours a day with the another Virginia who's even better than Santa.