Nadja

Nadja by André Breton proved an extremely quick—though not especially easy—read. It's quite simply a thin volume of artwork, composed of short musings interspersed with photographs referred to in the passages. Queer things happen without consequence and are immediately forgotten, but a mystical kind of feeling hangs over every page and there's a weight in every curious photograph that's hard to describe. It's actually one of the most successful pairings of prose and visual arts that I've seen, as I think this type of thing often bears disappointment or confusion. 

I recently watched the recent HBO series "Irma Vep", and I get the same curiously playful mood from Breton's work. Perhaps it's some sort of Frenchness that they share—light with a bit of darkness, complex but never unpleasant. 

A Farewell to Arms

Ok what the fuck?

I spent the entire time reading A Farewell to Arms wondering how Hemingway even had multiple drafts (my edition has photos of the author's handwritten notes and an appendix full of "Early Drafts") for such a simple and seemingly plotless narrative...but then the last 2 pages came and blew the drama out of the water. AND THEN IT JUST ENDS? WHAT HAVE WE LITERALLY BEEN DOING FOR ALMOST 300 PAGES?

Seriously, 282 pages of what read like a rando's personal diary for whom you don't feel any affection for, with terrible dialogue and a personality-less love interest, and then suddenly—and this is a spoiler now—she's dead and so is the baby (but also we don't care about the baby anyway?). I"m so confused about how this is even a book.

I chose this novel off the list because I had such a good experience with The Old Man and the Sea, but this was truly night and day. The heart-pumping action nor the passion of the former was non-existent (the main character in this book just nonchalantly slides out of danger like he's in a dream...or at least it's described that way) and sometimes the back-and-forth dialogue between the hero and his one-note old timey movie starlett love interest became so embarrassingly repetitive that it was downright cringe. "You won't with other girls will you now? Oh but I do want you to have other girls. I'm just a silly girl, don't you worry about me. I just love you so, don't you worry I'm a good girl now." Good god.

Hemingway MUST have learned how to write in some kind of dramatic change in the 23 years between Farewell and Old Man because they don't even read like they're coming from the same author. Is it the difference of pretentious youth and learned age? The difference is mind-bogglingly vast.