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Bezig met laden... Over de rivier en onder de bomen (1950)door Ernest Hemingway
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. When I first picked this up I almost put it straight back down. The main character, Colonel Cantwell, was shooting ducks, and the exquisite description of their flight and freedom, interspersed with their violent descent to earth, was a brutal juxtaposition. But I read on, lured by the setting: Venice. This story has been widely panned for its prose and lack of plot but this is Hemingway at his most honest, reflecting on the inhumanity of war and dealing with his ageing body and failing health. In Across The River and Into the Trees, the fifty-year-old protagonist tries to come to terms with his past as a soldier in a city that couldn’t be more different than the war zone. The beauty and tranquillity of Venice is reflected in the personality of Renata, the Colonel’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend. The story oozes with the atmosphere of post-war Venice, with the Colonel staying at the Gritti Palace and frequenting the now-famous Harry’s Bar. I couldn’t help but draw parallels with Hemingway’s real life, and that’s when I started to connect to the story more. Hemingway as an older man was infatuated with a girl of nineteen while staying in Venice. Rather than reading Renata’s character as a fantasy, I saw her as a mirror of Hemingway himself, a way to explore the youth and innocence he felt he had lost. Hemingway first went to war at eighteen, and then spent the rest of his life chasing death, through war or safaris. How do we make up for such loss of youth and idealism – where do we even start? This is a novel full of unspoken questions such as these, winding through the story like the canals that meander through Venice itself. The Colonel switches between soldier and lover over and over again, telling himself to be better, failing, then trying once more, as he attempts to come to some understanding of the motives and urges he has carried with him all his life. Much of the story is a recount of the vicissitudes of war. Death is everywhere in this book. Killing has been the Colonel’s ‘trade’ and in a way it was Hemingway’s too – it forms the subject of many of his stories. In the end the ducks are shot again, their helpless eyes looking into his. After reading the Colonel's recounts of the horrors of war I saw, with fresh eyes, why such a scene was so brutally rendered.
"The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel.... After the patronizing travelog ... the colonel has the rendezvous with his girl.... The novel was written as a serial for Cosmopolitan, whose demands and restrictions are I should say, almost precisely those of the movies." Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Delfinserien (97) Gallimard, Folio (589) Keltainen kirjasto (95) rororo (458) Is opgenomen inPrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Een bittere liefdesidylle, waarvoor geen uitkomst is, tussen een kolonel in het Amerikaanse leger die in beide wereldoorlogen heeft gevochten en een Venetiaanse jonge contessa. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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This is so typically Hemingway! I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was in eighth grade, and I’ve been a fan of his writing since.
This isn’t his best-known work, and I read it only to fulfill a challenge to read a book that was a bestseller the year I was born. Still, there is something about his writing that captures my attention. The short declarative sentences make the work immediate and bring this reader right into the story.
But the older I get the more I’m disturbed by the way the women are portrayed … or more accurately, but the way Hemmingway writes the male/female relationships. Knowing his own history of depression (and ultimate suicide), not to mention his four wives, I see him projecting his own character on the page, and I’m getting tired of it. ( )