Hemingway: Not on the same page

IMO, one of the things that made Hemingway so interesting as a writer was that he messed with readers’ minds in a different way than a lot of other writers had been doing up to that point. He focused on forcing people to read between the lines–how to make the readers do the heavy lifting/imaginative work of fiction with as few little black marks on the page as possible. Nothing wrong with that. But he seemed to forget that not everyone reads the same thing in between the lines, or reads between the lines at all, and he didn’t give a damn about getting readers on the same page. Almost literally.

In short, either you like his writing or you don’t, and that’s something that’s probably entirely by Hemingway’s design.

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