Woolf Withdrawal

I'm going through Woolf withdrawal.

It's painful.

For the time being, I have to tear myself away my love for Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, because if I don't then I will never be able to enjoy Hemingway's writing. My brain still wants to read in "Virginia Woolf" mode and hasn't yet adjusted to the simpler "Ernest Hemingway" mode.

This mostly manifests itself when reading Hemingway's short short sentences. After reading the long and beautifully metaphoric Woolf sentences, Hemingway's seem abrupt and choppy. It doesn't read the same. It takes almost more concentration to get used to these short sentences, which is ironic seeing as it should be easier to read because of its simplicity. 

But I think the thing I miss most about Woolf is the way she wrote her characters. She wrote the book almost from their point of view. We were privy to the innermost thoughts of all the characters, even some random Londoners walking down the street with Mrs. Dalloway. The story switches perspectives many times, giving us a vast amount of information on what the characters thought about the world, their place in it, and the people around them. 

The one thing that I find interesting about Hemingway versus Woolf is that Woolf used hardly any talking in her novel, and if there was it sometimes wasn't obvious at first glance who was having the conversation. In The Sun Also Rises, the majority of the book is either conversation between characters or thoughts from Jake.

These thoughts from Jake, a highly sarcastic and ironic narrator whose cynicism can be quite annoying at times, are interesting. But I want to know what Brett's thinking. I think Brett's thoughts would be fascinating to read because she has such a flamboyant public personality, and I wonder what her private self would look like. There are also so many other characters who would be interesting to read about from their perspective--characters like Robert Cohn, Frances, and Bill. Maybe even the policeman who smiled at Jake in the bar would have an interesting tidbit to add to the story, much like Scrope Pervis in Mrs. Dalloway.

I find Hemingway's writing style and his "iceberg principle" to be annoying after reading a book like Mrs. Dalloway. I don't just want to know about the surface interactions like the chit chat at the bar. I want to know what's beneath all that--what's going on in their heads at the bar (although, perhaps it's nothing coherent anyway if they're drunk). 

Mrs. Dalloway is a puzzle in book form. All the pieces of the story are laid out for us--scrambled around on the pages. It's up to us to piece them together as we read through each character's thoughts. The Sun Also Rises, on the other hand, is a riddle where a small amount of important information is available, and the reader must interpret and figure out a meaning for themselves by using what's present in the text. 

I really want to be able to like The Sun Also Rises, but so far I think I prefer the puzzle to the riddle. Hopefully as I get used to not reading Virginia Woolf I'll be able to appreciate Hemingway more than I do now.