June 21st, 2006
The End Of Something was the first Hemingway story I ever read. It was part of my English GCSE anthology and I can still remember the feeling I had when reading it. I told everyone who cared just to flip to the back to absorb the sad account of a relationship breaking apart under the most restrained circumstances.
Perhaps the reason why I enjoyed it so was that the feelings between the two characters were never elaborately stated, but at the same time you understood perfectly what they felt. I was glad the short story didn’t come up in the GCSE exam, so wasn’t trivialised by their questions.
I had always enjoyed Palin’s travel books but up until last Christmas didn’t realise that he was also a Hemingway aficionado, when I was given the complete Palin collection on DVD that included his “Hemingway Adventure” the series where he follows the journeys of the man himself through such places as Italy, Paris, Africa and Cuba. If you ever need an example of living life to the full, you can start with that.
Now. An odd occurance happened yesterday. I’ll first quote this out of the book Palin wrote that accompanies the series:
By my bed tonight is A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s famous story of love and war in Italy. It’s an orange and white Penguin paperback edition of 1959, price two shillings and sixpence, which I was issued with at school as part of my ‘A’ Level English Literature course. It’s dog-eared and coming apart at the spine, but I wouldn’t part with it. This was the book that introduced me to Hemingway and, in a sense, introduced me to Italy as well.
Yesterday our teacher handed out the books on which we could base our A-Level coursework projects on. Among them was “A Farewell To Arms”. Of course, I snapped it up for the lesson. I also proceeded to buy the book off Amazon for 5 pounds and 49 pence yesterday evening. Why? Well, I don’t think the college would appreciate doing to one of their copies what I intend to do with mine…