Tag Archives: Ernest Hemingway

Selbstkommodifizierung von Autoren

Auch in der Literatur hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten so etwas wie Commodification ausgebreitet. Bestimmten Autoren ist es gelungen, so etwas wie ein Markenartikel zu werden. Ein charakteristisches Beispiel dafür ist Ernest Hemingway, und in einer Besprechung eines seiner Romane habe ich darüber auch kurz geschrieben. Ein Autor, von dem alle ein bestimmtes Bild im Kopf haben, dass sich gewissermaßen von seinem literarischen Werk abgekoppelt hat und dieses häufig komplett ersetzt hat. Es soll Leute geben, die Hemingway als Lieblingsautor angeben, auch wenn sie noch nie ein Buch von ihm gelesen haben. (Mancher wäre unangenehm überrascht, wie schlecht und schwer erträglich manches von Hemingway ist, würde er ihn denn lesen.)

Dazu kommt, dass der Autor/in, der/die häufig in den Medien erscheint, in aller Munde ist und dadurch auch zum beliebten Gesprächsthema sich als gebildet betrachtender Menschen bei Cocktailpartys und dergleichen Gelegenheiten wird. Dabei ist es gar nicht unbedingt notwendig, herausragende Werke zu verfassen, entscheidend ist das soziale Interesse der Konsumenten.

Ein Autor, der das ganz ausgezeichnet verstanden hat, ist Peter Handke. Schon bei seinem allerersten Auftreten in den 1960er Jahren provozierte er das gesamte literarische Establishment der Gruppe 47; später kam dann seine Publikumsbeschimpfung dazu, in der er das Theaterpublikum auf ähnliche Weise provozierte. Die Leute finden das natürlich unterhaltsam und man kann sich je nach Naturell auch wunderbar darüber aufregen. Beides ist gut für den Autor in unserer heutigen Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie. Und egal, welchen Skandal Handke später lieferte – körperliche Gewalt gegen die Lebensgefährtin, Fausthiebe gegen einen Literaturkritiker, zahlreiche abgebrochene Interviews des sich jeweils provoziert fühlenden Autors, Beschimpfungen aus der Genital- oder Analsphäre gegen kritische Zeitgenossen vorzugsweise weiblichen Geschlechts, eine fast zweistellige Zahl von Büchern, in denen er mal mehr, mal weniger subtil sein geschichtsrevisionistisch-völkisches Jugoslawienbild zeichnet und nebenbei Propaganda für serbische Kriegsverbrecher macht, Interviews in denen er einen Genozid leugnet oder relativiert -, er erinnert die Öffentlichkeit mit diesen Skandalen immer wieder daran, dass es ihn gibt und das verschafft ihm enorme Medienresonanz, die er mit seinen Romanen, Erzählungen und Theaterstücken allein nie auch nur annähernd erreicht hätte. Die Folge sind neue Leser und Literaturpreise wie am Fließband, zuletzt auch der Nobelpreis. Alle wissen heute, wer Handke ist – er ist ein Markenartikel.

Im Zeitalter der sogenannten Sozialen Medien ergeben sich natürlich noch mehr Möglichkeiten als früher. Wenn man sieht, wie ungehemmt narzisstisch sich viele Autoren auf ihren Social Media-Auftritten in Szene setzen, kann das ebenfalls als mehr oder weniger erfolgreiche Strategien der Selbstkommodifizierung sehen. (Ich nenne hier ganz bewusst keine Beispiele; jeder kennt solche Peinlichkeitsorgien.) Daneben gibt es aber auch die Autoren, die hauptsächlich damit beschäftigt sind, ihre Bücher zu schreiben. Und als Leser interessieren mich selbstredend Bücher mehr als irgendwelche Schriftstellerselfies, inszenierte Skandälchen oder Selbstvermarktungsstrategien von medienhungrigen Schreiberlingen.

Um nur ein einziges Beispiel zu nennen: ich kann mich nicht erinnern, jemals auch nur ein einziges Interview mit Hartmut Lange gelesen zu haben – wahrscheinlich gibt es ein paar, aber sie sind mir nicht erinnerlich; ich weiß nicht mal, wie er aussieht. Und auch sonst hab ich ihn noch nie weder in einer Talkshow gesehen – ok, das ist jetzt ein wenig geschummelt: ich habe nämlich seit vielen Jahren keinen Fernseher mehr -, noch ist er mir als Unterzeichner irgendwelcher Appelle, Propagandist irgendwelcher zweifelhafter Thesen oder Sympathisant irgendwelcher dubioser politischer Gruppierungen erinnerlich. Wie steht er zum Klimawandel? Keine Ahnung, wahrscheinlich so wie ich auch. Seine Werke lassen einen hochintelligenten und reflektierenden Menschen vermuten. Das ganze markenartikelhafte Gehabe gibt es bei ihm (und vielen anderen Autorinnen und Autoren) überhaupt nicht. Es gibt nur, so zuverlässig wie bei einem Schweizer Uhrwerk, Jahr für Jahr aufs Neue diese relativ schmalen, aber großartigen Bücher von ihm. Erzählungen und Novellen hauptsächlich. In einer sehr schlanken, eleganten und verdichteten Prosa geschrieben. Egal, zu welchem der rund zwanzig Bände in der Diogenes-Backlist man greift, man wird einfach nie enttäuscht, sondern auf intelligente Art unterhalten und oft auch zum Nachdenken angeregt. Da lasse ich die ganze langweilige, ärgerliche Markenartikelliteratur gerne links liegen.

Anstatt jedem Hype und jedem Skandal hinterherzuhecheln, sollten wir die richtig guten Autorinnen und Autoren lesen.

© Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki, 2014-9. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and Mytwostotinki with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Why I rarely publish negative reviews

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Since I started this blog, I have reviewed approximately 120 books here; I share these reviews also in Goodreads and in Facebook. But I read much more books, which means that I am by far not writing about all the books I am in fact reading.

The reasons for this are mainly the following:

Reviewing takes some time; if you want to write something more than just a few superficial remarks, something meaningful, you need to spend a comparatively big amount of time – time I sometimes don’t have, or time I prefer to invest in something to me more valuable in that moment – for example in reading, travelling, working on my actual book project, or spending quality time with people that matter to me! And imagine, I have a job too, haha.

Furthermore, a lot of the books I am reading are not really creating this urge in me to write about them. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe the book is kind of dull and boring, or it is more or less ok, but nothing special and I have already forgotten the plot after a short time, or the topic is too special to be of any interest for a wider audience. So what’s the point to bother someone with my thoughts in such cases?

A special case are awe-inspiring books, books where I feel that at this moment they are beyond my capacities as a reviewer – recent example: Dostoevsky’s Demons. I would need to write a 10,000 words text if I wanted to review it, otherwise I would have to neglect important aspects of the book as I understand it. And if I will ever be able to express my limitless admiration of and fascination with Hans Henny Jahnn’s strange behemoth of a novel River without Banks – a book that literally changed my life and my view of life in general – in an adequate way remains a big question for me. (I reviewed the first part here; the biggest part of the novel was never translated in English.)

The fourth category are the hopelessly bad, crappy, worthless books that you come across sometimes. I am not particularly inclined to write reviews about books I didn’t enjoy or that I even strongly dislike. In general, I prefer to be silent in such cases instead of wasting valuable time to indulge in negative feelings. In general, I believe that I am usually much better in positively raving about the qualities of a book than to give it the thump-down. Therefore, only about 5% of my published reviews so far are negative; if I would write a review about every single book I am reading, this percentage would be much higher, maybe more like 25-30%.

So, in which cases of this fourth category I am nevertheless making the effort to publish my negative opinion about a book? There are of course, as I see in retrospect now, a few reasons:

There are books and authors that have acquired the status of a “classic”, or at least of being extremely popular. While I have no problem with popular books and authors in general, I have experienced a couple of times the situation that I read a book that was praised as a “masterpiece”, or even as “one of the best novels of the 20^th century” – and it turned out to be awfully bad from whatever standpoint you look at it. That’s what I call the “Emperor’s-New-Clothes syndrome”, and in such a blatant case as this one I feel obliged to raise my finger and voice my objection. This specific book and author get in my opinion much more attention than would be deserved if we look just at the – according to me hardly existing! – literary quality of the work; it is more a result of the successful efforts of the author during his lifetime to turn himself into a brand, than of the genuine quality of his writing that he occupies such a prominent place in literary history, and this book is praised by so many people although it is obviously no good at all (admittedly not all books by this author are as bad as the one I reviewed). The purpose of my review is to be a small contribution to a re-assessment of this specific book, and thus maybe also to a re-assessment of other, much better novels published during that period by authors who were not so good in self-marketing, but maybe better writers with some meaningful message in their works, written in a much better prose.

Another category of books are those by contemporary authors, who – supported by an aggressive marketing, a devoted group of friends in the media, and a similarly devoted crowd of “groupies” in social media – blow the horn and thus make a lot of noise around their silly, shallow, obnoxious books and turn this kind of attention into a mass phenomenon, and in extreme cases even into a movement that shares certain elements with a sect. That’s what I call the “One-million-flies-cannot-go-wrong syndrome”, and again I find myself every now and then in a position that I simply must voice my objection against such a book, and may it even be in a very succinct way, like in this case. (This review by a fellow book blogger sums it up very nicely in more detail what is wrong with this book and its author.)

Closely related to the last category are books that are lacking a basic quality a book (and its author) should have in my opinion: intellectual integrity. When the content and the message of a book is in stark contrast with the personal behaviour of its author, it is clearly a case of hypocrisy and lack of integrity. Intellectual impostors like the author of this book, should be always exposed.

Some books simply make me angry. A lot of people like this book and similar one’s by the same author – but to me it is obvious that the book is just an alibi for something else. This author makes his living by providing arousal templates for the needs of a very “special” audience. His sick anal-sadistic torture fantasies are poorly written, and as a reviewer I really hope that I prevent a few readers from exposing themselves to this revolting stuff.

Very young and inexperienced authors will be usually treated with kindness by me; most bad books I read by such authors will be never reviewed here. In exceptional cases, when for example the publisher is to blame for not editing a book by an inexperienced author at all (and thus doing him a very bad service), like in this case, I will make an exception. Not because I want to slam the poor author for his shortcomings, but because I find it unethical when some publishers don’t protect authors from seriously damaging themselves.

Another exception are cases (like this one) in which a young author who in my opinion lacks literary talent is “made” by a publisher, in co-operation with key figures of the literary scene; a system that manipulates the public, arranges that such an author gets literary awards, and plenty of media attention that will in turn help to generate additional money and influence for this person in the literary scene, damages the chances of other young authors with real literary talent (but maybe with less talent for self-promotion), and even corrupts the readers and potential young authors, because a system that systematically ignores literary merit must in the long run have negative repercussions on the literary life in general, especially when the book market in that country is very small. Also in these cases, a reviewer should speak out and make it clear when such a “hyped” book has no literary value, and is obviously more a media or lifestyle phenomenon than serious literature.

Hey, before I forget it – I know some authors personally. Some of them are nice people, others not so much. It is just like in all other spheres of life. Would the fact that I am in good or maybe not so good terms with someone influence my judgement (as imperfect as it may be) regarding the quality of their respective writing?

The answer is obvious: never!

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-7. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A ‘manly’ book by a ‘manly’ author

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After a long hiatus, I read these days my first Hemingway book since many years: Fiesta – The Sun Also Rises.

We all know – or we think to know – Ernest Hemingway, even if we had not read any of his books; of all 20^th century authors, he was arguably the most successful in creating a worldwide public image of himself, the brand “Hemingway”: a manly man keeping himself busy doing manly things (or things he thought were proof of his manliness). And when he was not busy hunting the biggest game, fishing the biggest fish, fighting the most dangerous bull, reporting from the most dangerous war front lines, downing the biggest amount of booze or courting the most attractive women (all the things you seem to have to do when you want to keep a show of being a manly man), he was hammering in a creative outburst with great energy all these outstanding manly novels and stories written in his trademark manly style into his typewriter, preferably stripped down to the waist and with a hard drink and a photographer at hand to distribute this image of the most manly author on earth and his hairy chest to all his readers and non-readers.

I never quite understood what’s exactly so manly about killing animals just for the fun and show-off, or what’s exactly so manly about being a third-degree alcoholic always on the border of a drunken stupor, or what’s exactly so manly about blowing your own brain out with a shotgun. What I quite understood somehow from the first time I came across Hemingway was that this was an author who had a serious issue with his own manliness (or possibly the lack thereof).

Many authors are a bit weird, or have issues, and some of the most talented writers were outright lunatics. So I am not holding this image and ridiculous and narcissistic show of manliness of the person Hemingway against his writing. A book is very frequently more perfect, even more intelligent than its author. We should never judge a book or any other piece of art based on personal sympathy or antipathy for the creator of this artwork. But in some cases, the defaults and flaws of the author show also in the artwork, and then the personality of the author becomes an issue. Fiesta – The Sun Also Rises is in my opinion such a case.

Some American and British expats, mostly wealthy heirs or people with artistic ambitions, mingle in the Paris of the mid 1920s. Life is pretty cheap after the war and Paris is a permissive city with a famous nightlife that made it so attractive for foreigners with hard currency. Paris was the place to be when you were a young heterosexual writer or journalist or when you were just looking for fun (Babylon Berlin was the obvious choice for the less mainstream-oriented faction).

Jake Barnes, the narrator, is a young journalist. His friend, the writer Robert Cohn, starts a relationship with the attractive and promiscuous heiress Lady Brett (two times divorced and planning another rich marriage) with whom also Barnes is in love.

Barnes, who was a soldier at the Italian front in WWI got seriously wounded and as a result is emasculated. Brett seems to love him nevertheless, but since her appetite cannot be fulfilled by Barnes, she starts a relationship with Cohn, and later in Spain where the group is traveling together with some other friends, Bill Gorton and Brett’s fiance Mike Campell, to watch a bullfight, she is seducing a very young bullfighter, Romero.

During the fiesta, the whole group gets drunk and starts to attack Cohn with anti-Semitic remarks. Cohn, who used to be an amateur boxer in college starts a fistfight and is beating up his opponents. After everyone is sober again, the group is quickly dispersing. Barnes receives a message from Lady Brett to come to Madrid, where she had gone with Romero. He finds her penniless in a cheap hotel. She is informing Jake that she intends to return to her fiance.

A quite interesting scenario I have to admit. The chapters are short. The sentences are very short. The book is a very fast read. In some scenes Hemingway shows that his craftsmanship can be excellent, especially when he describes the fiesta, the bullfight that he loved (and that I detest) so much. The book gives in some good moments a clear idea why Hemingway is such a highly revered author in the opinion of many readers.

And yet, I had more than one moment while I read the book, when I got so angry with Hemingway’s writing that I threw the book in disgust at the wall of my room.

As I mentioned, the book consists mainly of very short, childlike sentences. Subject-predicate-object. Subject-predicate-object. Subject-predicate-object. And so on and on, over pages and pages. I simply don’t like it. It does not have to be always the long and winding sentences of a Thomas Mann novel, but there is a thing called syntax and from time to time it would be just nice if the author would give us some sentences that are not written in this childlike style. “Do you have emotions? Strangle them.” This ironic Saul Bellow word about Hemingway’s style sounds very convincing to me after I read Fiesta. In short, when I read a book labeled “novel”, I want indeed read a novel and not a text that reads more like a film script most of the time, even when the author is the manly Hemingway.

Jake Barnes is not the most endearing narrator. Already on the first two pages he does everything to depict Cohn – who he claims is his friend – in the most disgusting and unsympathetic way. And even more, Barnes is using the most primitive anti-Semitic stereotype when it comes to paint Cohn in the most negative color. Describing Cohn’s talent for boxing, Barnes tells us (in one of the early passages before Hemingway falls back to his favorite style):

“He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose.”

Ah yes, Jews have crooked noses, hahaha – maybe in Hemingway’s eyes that was funny, but I find it only revolting. Similarly disgusting, or even worse are the insults that are thrown at Cohn during the fiesta by the others.

The same goes also for the image of women in the book. Lady Brett, although obviously a really attractive woman, is described as a very promiscuous but also cunning and calculating woman. She takes the men she wants, but she is marrying of course only for the money and wealth that it provides. All this talk about love and feelings is just talk, and her attraction to Barnes may be so strong because she knows she can never have him; the curiosity factor, you know. Barnes is a man only in appearance, but contrary to Cohn, Romero, and all the others, he is physically unable to satisfy her. The other women in the book, for example the French girl Georgette, are called poulet (chicken), and they are ready for the men’s consumption – IF you are a real man that is. I think the misogyny of the narrator is beyond question.

This mix of anti-Semitic and misogynistic stereotypes, together with the display of narcissism and self-pity of the narrator got on my nerves. It got on my nerves to an extent that I had to force myself to finish this repelling book.

OK, we should not necessarily identify the views of the narrator with the views of the author. Frequently authors put an unreliable narrator in charge or even one with whose opinions they completely disagree. But considering the autobiographical background of the story, we can dismiss this idea in this case.

Unfortunately this is a book written by a young author in Paris who was wounded in WWI, who drank his time away, got involved in the love triangle he describes in the novel. Hemingway’s affair and the story of the book are (almost) identical – with the important difference that Hemingway was emasculated by his alcohol abuse in later years, and not by a WWI wound. Hemingway’s main rival was Harold Loeb, a Jewish author and journalist, who was obviously not only the better boxer than Hemingway in real life, but also the better lover. As a reader we can feel, that Hemingway’s and Barnes’ opinions regarding Jews, women, boxing, bullfighting, and a lot of other things are identical. And it is not good when an author writes a book that is “too close to home.”

Spiteful, misogynistic and full of anti-Semitic stereotypes, written in a childlike style. That is Fiesta, by Ernest Hemingway. I know that’s a harsh verdict but I am here to give you my honest opinion for what it’s worth.

I am afraid the next manly Hemingway book has to wait for a long time to be read and reviewed by me.

P.S.: As for stereotypes, I almost forgot it – but it adds to the bleak picture; Hemingway’s characters (much as the author himself, as we know from his letters) have also strong opinions about non-whites. The infamous N word is used exclusively to characterize black people, who in general have no individual name.

Examples: an Afro-American jazz musician is described like this by the narrator:

“The n(…) drummer waved at Brett…. ‘Hahre you?’ ‘Great.’ ‘Thaats good.’ He was all teeth and lips.”

Yes, just like Jews have crooked noses, blacks are “niggers”, cannot speak proper English and have thick lips and shiny teeth in Hemingway’s world. But it gets even worse when the narrator meets a friend who was placing a bet on a black boxer in Vienna:

‘Remember something about a prize-fight. Enormous Vienna prize-fight. Had a n(…) in it. Remember n(…) perfectly.’ ‘Go on.’ ‘Wonderful n(…). Looked like Tiger Flowers, only four times as big. All of a sudden everybody started to throw things. Not me. N(…)’d just knocked local boy down. N(…) put up his glove. Wanted to make a speech. Then the local boy hit him. Then he knocked white boy cold. Then everybody commenced to throw chairs. N(…) went home with us in our car.’

And so on. Fifteen times the N word on less than one page. I don’t want to be politically correct but Hemingway’s characters in this book are without exception extremely racist, shallow and uninteresting people. Why do I have to follow this story of a bunch of drunkards that are described without any depth in a staccato language that makes every dialogue from a soap opera in comparison sound like high literature? Just because his characters share the author’s own unsupportable opinions about race, Jews, drinking, women and bullfighting?

Thanks, but no, thank you.

Ernest Hemingway: Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Arrow Books, London 2004

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© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.