Hemingway’s Narrative Voice
by Evan Shultz
I work at Border’s Books & Music, stocking books on shelves. I don’t do it for the money, of course; I do it for the reading. Most days I get an hour lunch break, and I can get free iced tea and a discount on café food, and sit down with that and a book I’ve pulled off a shelf and will put back before I clock in. If it’s a good book I can find it again after I’m done working and read some more. I can finish a good book in about a week or two, and I don’t have to finish the bad ones.
Currently I’m eating away at A Movable Feast, by Hemingway. It’s good, so after three days I’m more than halfway through. If I finish it, it will be the first Hemingway book I ever finish. I mean novel; I’ve read through many of his short stories – although A Movable Feast may not count as a novel since it is autobiographical. Autobiographies are not fiction – they are almost non-fiction, in fact. It is not the first time Hemingway has written in the first person; read The Sun Also Rises and see. But it is the first time his writing is mostly factual as well as mostly true, and it is pleasant and natural to read.
I read for a length of time, then stop when I don’t want to so I can do work when I don’t want to, and, because I am so abruptly woken from Hemingway’s narrative voice, his voice stays in my head and narrates everything I do for the next few hours. That’s what happens when a dream ends before its time; it lingers like a ghost and finds a way to haunt you briefly: the same when you are shaken awake from a nightmare, the same when you are shaken awake from a story. The same for everybody.
Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve also not slept much the last three days. Either way, I tend to think things like, “After lunch I would shelve another cart of books, and after that I would clock out and walk back out onto the floor feeling happy and free again, and stand next to the shelf reading more of a book I’d just shelved.” I don’t know if that’s crazy. I know it’s a more interesting thought than, “Damn, these books won’t fit.” If it is crazy, writing like Hemingway would be worth it – but I don’t think it’s crazy. Calling something crazy assumes such a thing as sanity, which I’m not sure I believe in.
