Stranger on Earth

On May 10th of 1934, a month after the publication of his new novel, Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend, Ernest Hemingway, and asked for his honest opinion on the book — a tale about Dick and Nicole Diver, a couple based largely on mutual acquaintances of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Gerald and Sara Murphy. Hemingway certainly responded with honesty. His engrossing reply — a letter that contains plenty of advice for any writer — can be read below. (Note: Hemingway's spelling is shown accurately. For example, he twice wrote "write" where, presumably, he meant "right.") ( Source: Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961; Image: Ernest Hemingway, via. ) Key West 28 May 1934 Dear Scott: I liked it and I didn't. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can't refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them,...

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is now remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring work, not least because of its detailed and personal account of the Spanish Civil War. Its laconic treatment of the universal subjects of friendship, sex, and love – essentials that give additional meaning to life in times of war – is the reason for its lasting appeal. The plot is crudely simple, like the characters’ motives. American Robert Jordan decides to do his part for the country he claims to love by working as a dynamiter for a republican guerrilla unit, and one day, owing to an assignment to blow up a bridge, he finds himself among a group of disparate rebels hiding high up in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra. The novel records only three and a half days of Robert’s experience (and yet this is the longest Hemingway novel); at the end of the “adventure,” things go horribly wrong, as foreshadowed, and the reader is forced to leave the hero behind and move on – just like the re...

And the sky, the light, the trees, the whole of Nature would be, as always, in league with them: Daniel was a man of evil will. (136)  This curious line describes Daniel, the only homosexual character in The Age of Reason , and his perception of himself. It is an unflattering image imbued with self-loathing, indicative of a mind that views its perceiver as a social outcast and a victim of universal oppression. It is interesting to note that Daniel’s homosexuality is hidden from the public, and that there is no indication that he has been openly discriminated against – and yet, what we have here is a young man in his prime, possessor of a “dark, handsome, blue-jowled visage,” whom Marcelle ironically calls “her dear archangel” (82), grappling with a self-hatred so powerful that every thought crossing his mind is associated with destruction and death. Our first proper introduction to him takes place in Chapter 7, and it is here that we find Daniel shaving “naked to the...

The first instalment of Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy Roads to Freedom , The Age of Reason ( L’ Â ge de Raison , 1945), compels the modern reader to re-define the idea of freedom, conventionally worded as “the condition of being free of restraints” (The Free Dictionary). “Free of restraints” is murky waters when it comes to Mathieu and Daniel, the two main characters of Sartre’s soul-searching work.  Sartre’s characters are primarily “for-itself beings,” existentially free persons who act according to the choices that have moulded them. The words “existentially free” are oxymoronic, and the phrase “free persons who act according to the choices that have moulded them” is painfully paradoxical. This is classic Sartrean paradox: it tells you that as an individual you are “free” to make choices, but these choices are pre-determined by a whole other set of choices beyond your control or manipulation. Mathieu Delarue has made the mistake of impregnating his mistress of seven ...

The end of 2011 belonged to serious, confrontational cinema. Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin and Steve McQueen’s Shame (read my review of Shame here:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/02/true-fiction-steve-mcqueens-shame.html ) shocked art-house audiences everywhere by revealing to them the most candid portraits of contemporary society. It is telling that both films were ignored by the fuddy-duddy fogies at the Academy Awards. This embarrassing blunder should say more about the Academy than the two films, which are made of much weightier (and therefore more relevant) stuff than any of the 2012 Oscar-winners.    Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin is relentless in the way it broaches its subjects. Are all mothers naturally maternal? it asks us to consider from the get-go. We see Eva (a stellar Tilda Swinton) struggle with motherhood, trying to come to grips with a new addition to her carefree life with her husband. The fact tha...

May 15, 2012 Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be Posted by  Ryan Bloom for The New Yorker For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French could adequately translate it. So why do the pros keep getting it wrong? Within the novel’s first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows. What makes these particular choices prickly is that they poke at a long-standing debate among the literary community: whether it is necessary for a translator to have some sort of special affinity with a work’s author in order to produce the best possible text. Arthur Goldhammer, translator of a volume of Camus’s Combat...