Month: October 2015

Exhibition Delves Below Deceptively Simple Surface Of Hemingway's Prose

Source: NPR

A new exhibit, 54 years after Hemingway's death, tells a different story. Declan Kiely, curator of "Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars" at New York's Morgan Library, says, "So much of his great writing is about failure. It's about weakness. It's about fear."

The first manuscript in the show — and perhaps the rarest — is four pages on Red Cross stationery handwritten in a Milan hospital in 1918 by a teenage Hemingway wounded during World War I. It's the writer's first story to feature his alter ego, Nick Adams. Here, he is a badly injured soldier who falls in love with a nurse, then takes his own life.

Kiely notes that it has many hallmarks of the Hemingway style, including pared-down dialogue, brief descriptions and an arresting first paragraph: "Nick lay in bed in hospital where from outside came the hysterical roar of the crowd walking through the streets."

But it contains the raw material for one of Hemingway's most celebrated novels, A Farewell to Arms. He wrote 47 different endings for the novel before settling on the one he liked.

"That is all there is to the story," reads one of the four endings on display at the Morgan Library. "Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you."

"It doesn't get much bleaker than that," Kiely says.

Alongside the alternate endings are the first two pages of the first draft of A Farwell to Arms. Kiely notes the multiple revisions until the "absolutely beautiful, poetic, haunting beginning of the novel" starts to take shape for the very first time: "In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and a plain to the mountains."

Hemingway worked hard to write prose that looked so simple, says Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway scholar at Penn State University and editor of the author's collected letters, being published in 17 volumes.

"I think that what's valuable about this exhibit is that we can see the inner workings, we kind of see behind the curtain the tapestry with all the knots and flaws showing — but see how he worked his way into, I think, perfection in certain cases," Spanier says.

The exhibit — which includes handwritten first drafts, outtakes, letters, notebooks and photos — lays out Hemingway's papers in chronological order: handwritten drafts of his early stories; the first two chapters he cut from his 1926 breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises; and the letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald convincing Hemingway the chapters had to go.

Hemingway saved everything and, miraculously, almost everything is intact, says curator Declan Kiely.

Belarusian Journalist Svetlana Alexievich Wins Literature Nobel

Source: NPR
October 08, 2015 7:05 AM ET
By: Colin Dwyer


Alexievich won "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," according to the citation for the award.


'Voices From Chernobyl': Survivors' Stories

On her personal website, Alexievich explains her pursuit of journalism: "I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves." Fittingly, Alexievich prefers to leave the stories to her many interviewees, letting eyewitness accounts shed an unsettling light on tragedies like World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War and the disaster at Chernobyl — an investigation that has been read aloud in excerpts on All Things Considered.

For that work, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people touched by the massive 1986 nuclear meltdown, which spread radioactivity on the wind across much of Eastern Europe.

"All of my books consist of witnesses' evidence, people's living voices," she told the Dalkey Archive Press. "I usually spend three to four years writing a book, but this time it took me more than ten years."

In an interview following the announcement, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, elaborated on the decision.

"For the past 30 or 40 years, she has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual," Danius said. "But it's not really about a history of events; it's about a history of emotions."

If you're new to Alexievich's work, Danius added, she recommends beginning with War's Unwomanly Face — a history the Soviet women who fought as soldiers in the Second World War.

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