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Completed
01 May 2009
Title
The Torrents of Spring
Author
Ernest Hemingway
Published
1926
Quote
"Why shouldn't he work with his hands? Rodin had done it. Cezanne had been a butcher. Renoir a carpenter. Picasso had worked in a cigarette-factory in his boyhood. Gilbert Stuart, who painted those famous portraits of Washington that are reproduced all over this America of ours and hang in every schoolroom----Gilbert Stuart had been a blacksmith. Then there was Emerson. Emerson had been a hod-carrier. James Rusell Lowell had been, he had heard, a telegraph operator in his youth. Like that chap down at the station. Perhaps even now that telegrapher at the station was working on his 'Thanatopsis' or his 'To a Waterfowl.' Why shouldn't he, Scripps O'Neil, work in a pump-factory?"
Review
What an oddly written book. It doesn't strike me as pure Hemingway, the Hemingway I know and love. No, this book, published in 1926, was one of the very first novels he published. So, it stands to reason that Hemingway hadn't yet found his voice.

It's a strange book, with strange characters. But a short, quick read. And worth the time.

And, apparently The Torrents of Spring is a spoof on the book, Dark Laughter, by Sherwood Anderson, published in 1925.

I love it when one book links to another like that. Now I'll have to get ahold of this Anderson book. Should be interesting reading.



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