I'm actually a couple of books behind on this, I read two more during my vacation but have yet to write anything. I think that's the first time I've ever fallen behind on the writing, its usually the reading I fall behind on...

ANYWAY! Books 19 and 20 are That Old Ace in the Hole by Anne Proulx and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.

That Old Ace in the Hole deals with Bob Dollar, originally from Denver, where he was raised by a junk store owning uncle after his parents basically abandoned him on the uncle's doorstep, trying to find his place in the world. He's finished college and rather aimless (yeah, we've all been there), so he takes a job with Global Pork Rind, a big business pork farming company, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. He's given a list of instructions by his not very symapthetic new boss (ie. find some place to set up base of operations, find out a little history to the town, don't tell them why you're there, befriend some of the natives, etc.) Soon he''s holed up in a tiny Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease''s Old Dog Café, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old Texas ranch owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it.

It's a novel about history and family and all the ways those are intertwined. Bob's personal history is not easy, but isn't bad either. When his parents abandoned him at age 8, he was taken in by his Uncle Tam, who owns a second hand/junk store. They live upstairs from the store, and are pretty poor, but Tam is kind and good to Bob and never makes his nephew feel like a burden. Bob wonders a lot about his absent parents, but they don't figure too prominently into the story. What Bob though is really looking for, is a place where he feels he belongs.

Once Bob gets to Woolybucket, he immerses himself into the culture of the town, and into the town (and surrounding county), listening to countless stories told to him and reading a journal detailing the first surveying of the surrounding county in the late 1800s. The narrative of the novel is told in lots of flashbacks that aren't really flashbacks, as we get to know the colorful characters of Woolybucket.

As always in a Prouxl novel, the characters are slightly off-kilter, there's lots of strange happenings, a little bit of tragedy, lots of good language, and just plain great description of the landscape. Prouxl's just so good at describing surroundings. The ending of this novel left me feeling kinda... unsatisfied at first. It is basically a happy ending, but at first it felt too pat to me, but once I thought about it, it really wasn't, as it was the logical ending that was being proposed from the beginning, and I, like Bob himself, didn't see that right away. So basically, Anne's yet to let me down.

Number 20 of the year is A Farewell to Arms. Even now, a couple of weeks after finishing this puppy, I realize I don't have much to say about it, even though its a great piece of literature, etc. The thing is, found this book wildly divergent in its tone. It takes place during WWI, on the Italian front, and tells the story of American ambulance driver Lt. Henry, and his love affair with English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Despite there being a war on, Henry seems to have a pretty sweet life. He's living in an Italian villa with others (mainly Italians) fighting the war, in particular a surgeon who is Henry's best friend. He meets Catherine and begins wooing her, and much of the first part of the novel is taken up with going to cafes and drinking wine and teasing the local priest; WWI in Italy sounds nearly idyllic here in comparison to dying in the mud of the trenches on the Western Front. I did find the relationship between Catherine and Henry to be almost... pathetically juvenille and even a little creepy at first. Catherine seems so... desperate for Henry's approval and love that it made me uncomfortable. She seems more invested in the relationship at first than he does.

However, about half way through the novel comes a pretty good shift in tone. The war actually intrudes and then we're reminded how Hemingway is one of the best there is at describing war. Henry is driving at the front when he gets wounded. He sees comrades die, and isn't even entirely sure he'll walk again. He is transferred to a hospital, and so is Catherine. Once again, things become almost idyllic as he and Catherine deepen their relationship (and it becomes very, very physical), and so the tone of their relationship switches too, where I felt that Henry was more invested in it than she was. But maybe that's just because he finally arrived at the emotional place she was, while hers remained unchanged. But, the war intrudes again and Henry is sent back to the front.

At this point, the war is going badly for the Italians and they are facing a hard push by combined Austrian/German forces. They cannot hold the line, and so retreat, but the retreat becomes more disorganized and scary than the actual fighting does, with demoralized men and frightened nationals picking out scapegoats from their own army and executing them for deriliction of duty in mock 'trials'. Henry is singled out for this form of 'justice', but manages to escape. He basically goes AWOL and ends up finding Catherine. At this point, he is done with the war and he and Catherine (who is now pregnant with Henry's child) go to Switzerland (after narrowly avoiding arrest) to await the birth of their child. Their idyllic life returns.

However, honestly, the ending of this novel is so gawdawful depressing that I threw it down with those very words. Yes, sometimes Hemingway likes to end on a down note, like in For Whom the Bell Tolls, although that one didn't feel so down, or on a very up note (literally) in The Sun Also Rises. Needless to say, I preferred both of those books over this one. The ending really did make me not like it.

Well , that's really sad. My last completed book was nearly two months ago now. Sheesh... I really have got to stop reading multiple books at once. Nothing gets read quickly then.

Number 22 is For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. (hereafter abreviated as FWtBT)

One of the benefits of an English degree earned at a Canadian university is that you don't have to read a lot of American literature. Of course, you have to read a lot of stuff written by dead British guys and insufferable Canadians, but that's not really a surprise.

So, because I only had to take one half credit in American Lit, my exposure to Papa Hemingway has been rather limited. Limited to one short story actually, The Snows of Kilimonjaro. It wasn't until well out of university that, upon a friend's recommendation, I delved into a Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises. Which, I did enjoy, as there was a weirdly autobiographical element to it that I won't get into, but suffice to say it's there.

I'd been meaning to pick up FWtBT for sometime, having enjoyed my first dip into the Hemingway pool enough to go back again, and came close to picking up a cheap copy of it at a discounted/used book store. How fortunate I didn't, as I discovered a copy down in the basement amongst my brother's books.

I really liked it. It's an... odd book to get the feel of because its mainly written from the pov of Robert Jordan (the main character and not the fantasy author of the same name), who is an American ex-pat acting as a guerilla fighter for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. So basically, none of the dialogue is actually in English, and Hemingway captures the slight disconnect between the American and his Spanish comrades. Jordan speaks Spanish, but its not his native tongue of course, so now and then, he and his comrades don't understand one another. And the speech is actually simplistic sometimes as they try to get their points across to one another (this is especially noticable when Jordan goes to meet one of the rebel leaders El Sordo. El Sordo, not realizing (or perhaps caring) that Jordan can speak Spanish very well, speaks to him almost as one would a child, in a strange, simplisitc patois).

I also like how all the characters swear a lot (especially the Spanish ones), yet Hemingway only inserts "obsenity" in place of the actual swear word. One of the more common curses was "I obsenity in the milk of thy..." whatever they were describing. I found it became a fun game to mentally puzzle in which curse word was most appropriate in the sentence. I'm not sure if this was a stylistic choice of Hemingway's or simply because, when he was writing, you just didn't write down the swear words. Either way, I actually found it fun.

But overall, FWtBT is not a fun book. It is a graphic, brutally honest depiction of war. It tells of close comradeship, betrayal, competence, incompetence, love, hatred, attrocity, everything that goes on in a war. Even the tactical writing is extremely well done, from El Sordo's last stand to the blowing of the bridge, the reason that Robert Jordan meets up with the guerilla band in the first place. And the description of what Pablo did to the Facists in his village was just... hard to read. But it was an excellent, scary and probably disturbingly realistic portrayal of mob rule and brutality.

The ending's not exactly a happy one either. I don't know why I really expected there to be one, and I guess, its open ended enough that you could shoehorn one in there if that's what you really need to do... but that wouldn't work for me. I think Robert Jordan took a few of the enemy down with him at end, but I don't think he survived either. And I think he was very accepting of that.