Hemingway's Descriptiveness

Journal A.1 May 18, 2011

I started reading Hemingway on my flight to Atlanta. I like it. Hemingway describes well the setting and details of a given situation. I can almost taste the oysters he’s eating in the café and picture the pretty woman he is watching from across the room. He gives the sort of details that I need in order to properly visualize his environment and have a feel for the overall mood. I hope to be pleasantly surprised when I encounter a similar café or restaurant and feel somewhat acquainted with it even before experiencing it for myself thanks to the reading. The thoughtful descriptions end up only making me very jealous of his life and conquests. It pushes me to pursue fun and adventurous journeys of a similar, if not higher, caliber. I think his writing style and detail strikes me as special because I think I would write in a somewhat similar fashion, although I know my writing would not be nearly as talented or entertaining. His writing includes “the little things” that should not be overlooked or unappreciated, like the particular hair cut of the pretty woman and the flavor that remains in his mouth after drinking some white wine after his oysters. This maybe a brash inference considering I have so far read only a handful of pages, but maybe I especially admire his writing style because it is from the male perspective. A female writer would not linger on the appearance of an attractive female or go into great detail about her look simply because the writer is not a man. I say this largely because of Hemingway’s quote at the beginning of the book, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”