Customer Reviews

Ernest Hemingway Reads: The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech : In Harry's Bar in Venice and Other of His Writings

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4 star:		(1)
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No need to say a lot. If you like to read Hemingway, you just have got to hear him read his own words. It's so very strange when you press the play-button the first time...

This may be the only recording of Hemingway reading his own works. It is not of the best sound quality. And the works he reads from are also not his best.
My remarks relate to the Nobel Prize Speech. Hemingway known for his bluster and braggadocio reveals a surprising and quite touching humility in the speech when he refers to all the great writers who were never given the prize. He also speaks about the loneliness of the writing craft and the challenge to with each work aim at something new, and provide a creation to the world which has not been here before.
Here is an excerpt containing some of the most telling remarks of his speech.

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you."

Very well done chap. Probably could not have done better myself. There were some soft spots in it which caused me to look at it poorly for a moment. If I weren't so nice, I might have given it a 3 star rating. Don't get me wrong, it was well written and I enjoyed it dearly. I do rate books rather harshly sometimes. Only cause I want people to understand that they and we or all of us can do better.