preface
To start off with, I have reread this book, so I’ll put the old review on the bottom and the new one on top such that it starts with my most recent thoughts and you can track how my opinion changed on it, at least with the little little I’ve written the last time.
preamble to march 2025 review
Some days in February and march this year were surprisingly hot. Hot in the sense of +20C and that meant wearing shorts and shirt outside for the first time in the year.
Thinking about summer then, due to the “high” temperatures my mind was jumping back to having read it two years before around Christmas, so I fetched it again from my bookshelf to read it once again.
The second read was even nicer than the first one, still knowing the vague structure and characters but having forgotten the exact plot it was more still a treat without much enjoyment getting lost.
review from the 22nd of march 2025
Hemingway is great at describing environments as well as dynamics between people while writing in the first person of the protagonist Jacob Barnes. Much of this work lives through exchanging dialogue such that you end up giving the people certain voices in your head and feel the dialogue to a certain extend.
This book more than many others made me wish good and bad upon people because Jacob talked so well on why he dislikes people or why he feels sorry for them.
The book, in summary, just portrait rich writers or fortunate wives travelling together. Not too much traveling but rather just going places they enjoy in western Europe. Starting in Paris and then ending up going through Spain to go fishing and see the bullfight of the “San Fermines” in Pamplona.
In most cases it will just show one an interesting life that one probably won’t be able to life. The days of let me just go places around Europe and publish a book every other year is not anything one can realistically aim for anymore, not that it would’ve been realistic then, in the earlier 20th century, after WWI, but at least then you could say creatives were maybe even in a different class of people such that for those it was available to choose to life that lifestyle.
But that doesn’t matter too much.
What I want to say is that the book is a rewarding read, I can very much recommend it, especially for those going into summer soon. It did change my view of summer a bit for the better and makes me not just sit in the basement and spent my time with math and CS :).
review from the 9th of February 2024
Thinking back to reading it, that was one of the books that had such an iconic use of English that it changed my own.
Hemingway’s use of language is very characteristic, I can’t put into words what it was, but it changed something for me. Something clicked