Over conversation that evening Sanin grows increasingly enamoured with the young Gemma, while the Roselli family is also well-taken by the young, handsome, educated, and gracious Russian. Sanin so enjoys his evening that he forgets about his plans to take the diligence on to Berlin that night and so misses it. At the end of the evening Leonora Roselli invites Sanin to return the next day. That evening Sanin enjoys another enjoyable time with the Rosellis and becomes yet more taken by the charm and beauty of Gemma. During lunch at an inn the party shares the restaurant with a group of drinking soldiers.
A drunken officer among their number approaches Gemma and rather brazenly declares her beauty. The enraged Sanin on the other hand, feels compelled to confront the soldiers, and going over declares the offending officer an insolent cur and his behaviour unbecoming an officer. Sanin also leaves his calling card, anticipating he might be challenged to a duel for his public words. The following morning a friend of the offending German officer arrives early at Sanin's door demanding either an apology or satisfaction on behalf of his friend.
Sanin scoffs at any notion of apologizing and so a duel is arranged for the following day near Hanau. Departing the Roselli home that night, Sanin has a brief encounter with Gemma, who calls him over to a darkened window when she spots him leaving along the street. As they whisper to one another there is a sudden gust of wind that sends Sanin's hat flying and pushes the two together.
Sanin later feels this was the moment he began to fall in love with Gemma. The next morning on the way to Hanau, Pantaleone's earlier bravado has largely faded. Sanin does his best to embolden him. The officer, feeling his honor has been satisfied, then apologizes for his drunken behavior, an apology Sanin readily accepts. Sanin feels somewhat disgusted afterward that the whole duel was a farce. Pantaleone, however, is overjoyed with the outcome. Returning to Frankfurt with Pantaleone and Emilio who had secretly followed him to the duel site , Sanin discovers that Emilio has in turn told Gemma about the duel.
Sanin is a little put off by the indiscretion of this pair of chatterboxes, but cannot be angry. Back in Frankfurt, Sanin soon learns from a distraught Frau Lenore that Gemma has cancelled her engagement to Klaus for no apparent reason than that he did not defend her honor sufficiently at the inn.
Frau Lenore is frantic at the idea of the scandal this will cause and Sanin promises to talk to Gemma and convince her to reconsider. In Sanin's subsequent talk with Gemma, she professes her love for him but tells him that for his sake she will reconsider her estrangement from Klaus. Astonished and overcome by her confession of love, Sanin then urges her to do nothing just yet.
Sanin then returns to his rooms to orient himself to this new development and there pens his own declaration of love to Gemma and gives it to Emilio to deliver. Gemma sends her response telling Sanin not to come to their home the next day, without providing an exact reason. So the next day Sanin spends with a delighted Emilio in the countryside and that evening returns to his rooms to find a note from Gemma asking him to meet her in a quiet public garden of Frankfurt at seven the next morning. This Sanin does and the two declare their love for one another and Sanin proposes marriage.
Frau Lenore is shocked and hurt to learn of Sanin's love and thinks Sanin a hypocrite and a cunning seducer. But Sanin demands to meet with the disconsolate Frau Lenore and eventually convinces her of his noble intentions as well as his noble birth and his income sufficient to care for Gemma. Sanin decides he must sell his small estate near Tula in Russia in order to pay for his planned nuptials and settling down with Gemma. By chance, he meets in the street the next day an old schoolmate of his, Hippolyte Sidorovich Polozov, who has come to Frankfurt from nearby Wiesbaden to do some shopping for his wealthy wife, Maria Nikolaevna.
This seems to confirm Sanin's notion that a lucky star follows lovers, for Maria is from the same region near Tula as himself, and her wealth might make her a likely prospect to buy his estate, thus saving him a journey home to Russia. Sanin proposes this notion to the phlegmatic Hippolyte, who informs Sanin that he is never involved in his wife's financial decisions but that Sanin is welcome to return to Wiesbaden with him to present the idea to Maria.
Sanin agrees though it will pain him to separate from Gemma. In Wiesbaden, Sanin soon meets the mysterious Maria Nikolaevna Polozov, and though conscious of her beauty is all business as Gemma still owns his heart. Maria informs him that she herself is the daughter of a peasant and indeed speaks to Sanin in the Russian of the common classes rather than high Russian or French. Maria is interested in purchasing Sanin's estate but asks Sanin to give her two days to contemplate it.
In the days that follow, and seemingly against his own will and inclination, Sanin finds himself increasingly obsessed by the curious Maria Nikolaevna as she intrudes herself upon his thoughts. Maria invites Sanin to the theater where they share a private box. Bored with the play they retreat further into the box where Maria confesses what she cherished more than anything else is freedom, and thus her marriage to the rather witless Polozov, a marriage in which she can have absolute freedom.
Before parting company for the evening Dmitry agrees to go riding with Maria the following day, in what he thinks will be their last meeting before he returns to Frankfurt and she proceeds to Paris. The next morning the pair heads off on their ride in the countryside accompanied only by a single groom, whom Maria soon dispatches to a local inn to wile away the afternoon, leaving her and Sanin to themselves. The seemingly fearless Maria leads Sanin on a vigorous ride across the countryside that leaves them invigorated and their horses breathless.
When a thunderstorm moves in Maria leads them both to an abandoned cottage where they make love. After their return to Wiesbaden, Sanin is eaten with remorse. When Maria greets her husband in his presence Sanin detects an uncharacteristic look of irritation on Polozov's face and it is revealed that he and his wife Maria had a wager on whether she could seduce Sanin, a wager Polozov has now lost.
Maria asks Sanin if he is to return to Frankfurt or accompany them to Paris. His response is that he will follow Maria until she drives him away.
The Torrents of Spring
His humiliation is complete. The story then reverts to the present, some thirty years after these events. Sanin is again in his study, contemplating the garnet cross previously revealed to have belonged to Gemma ; and Sanin is again eaten with remorse, and recalls all the bitter and shameful memories he felt after the events of Wiesbaden, such as how he sent a tearful letter to Gemma that went unanswered, how he sent a groom of the Polozovs to fetch his things in Frankfurt, and even how the elderly Pantaleone, accompanied by Emilio, came to Wiesbaden to curse him.
Most of all he recounts his embittered and shame-ridden life afterwards, in which he followed Maria until he was thrown off like an old rag and has since remained unmarried and childless. Sanin immediately writes to her, describing the events of his life and begging that she respond as a sign that she forgives him.
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He vows to remain in Frankfurt at the same inn he stayed in thirty years ago until he receives her response. Eventually she does write and forgives him, while telling him about the lives of her family she now has five children and wishing him happiness, while also expressing the joy it would give her to see him again, though she doesn't think it likely. She encloses a picture of her eldest daughter, Marianna, who is engaged to be married.
Sanin anonymously sends Marianna a wedding gift: Gemma's garnet cross, now set in a necklace of magnificent pearls. The novel ends with the author noting rumors that Sanin, who is quite financially well off, is planning to sell off his property and move to America. He was not very inspired by the place, not often at least, which is a shame, because the Nick Adams tales are the best writing I have read of his.
But here we have a more farcical view of Indians than those found in the Nick Adams tales. He clearly saw the Indians as crude, dangerous, idiots - or if they were girls: Well, his characters are usually great charmers of the girls anyway, civilized and savage.
Hemingway views the ideas of Anderson as trite and poorly formed. But to my mind, Anderson was simply a man who believed in simplicity, and much of his writing was a striving against the industrial revolution, a brave attempt to notice anything beautiful in the common. Anderson might've overdone it at times, but Hemingway went on to write 'The Old Man And The Sea', a book I admire, but anyone could parody and insult that straightforward story in the same form Hemingway uses to insult his early champion.
Anyway, the book is a little funny, but I notice Hemingway is funniest when he is insulting things, as many authors are I guess. Maybe there was something that happened between them that we will never know about. I've rated this one star not based on what I think of its literary quality, but based on the enjoyment I felt reading it.
I'm sure it was better when it was written, but this book is a parody - and parody is a very demanding genre. Just like fanfiction, it requires you to know the source material, and well enough to recognize it between the lines. And "The Torrents of Spring" is a parody, something which I would have probably figured out eventually, but which I was happily told from the introduc I've rated this one star not based on what I think of its literary quality, but based on the enjoyment I felt reading it.
And "The Torrents of Spring" is a parody, something which I would have probably figured out eventually, but which I was happily told from the introduction to the volume, written by David Garnett - a man I've never heard of before today, but who seems to be a decent fellow.
Google tells me he was a British writer and publisher who lived between and Anyway, his introduction begins thus: Thirty-one years ago when I read 'The Torrents of Spring' and wrote an introduction to it, I thought it was screamingly funny. I do not think it so funny now. The reason is that the literary approach and style which Hemingway was parodying had imposed itself on us then and we were delighted to find it ridiculed.
Now the joke needs explanation, so that it has lost its topical point. There's no mention of when the introduction itself was written, but as "The Torrents of Spring" was first published in and first published in the UK in , I'll assume that Garnett's introduction was written around - and he would have been around and old enough to read the authors Hemingway parodied back when they were getting published. Even so, thirty-forty years later, the joke had lost a great part of its fun even for him.
Nearly a century after it was first published, I have no idea what the original texts were. I don't think I've heard of Sherwood Anderson before. I certainly haven't read anything written by him - perhaps, had I been American, or had I been more interested in the literature of the early 20th century, I might have, but as it is, I'd need a goddamn companion to the literature and literary atmosphere of the 's to understand the finer points.
So what's the book about, when you don't know what it's about? Aka, when you don't know the source material? There's a man who likes drinking with his wife and watching trains go by. One night, when they do this, she vanishes, so he just walks off into another town, leaving his daughter behind. You might think this is a touching story.
But the sentences are clipped. There's no emotional involvement. He shouts after her. Maybe she's gone somewhere. So he walks off. The train tracks are there.
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He comes across a bird. He stuffs the bird down his shirt. They walk to a town. The town sign says "Petoskey". He wonders if the town is Petoskey. He looks at the sign. The sign says "Petoskey". Could it be Petoskey? I swear, the second half of the paragraph is exactly what most of the book sounds like. I'm sure it's a parody of something, but I have no reference point. So, the man who lost his wife gets another wife, but the moment he does, he's attracted by another woman - and apparently, he finds women attractive based on how well-acquainted they are with stories about literature.
Another guy has been in the war and it's left a huge mark on him. He walks around with two Indians the Native American kind , talking about the war and thinking that he can't get it up anymore, until he sees a naked Indian woman walk into a restaurant. Occasionally, chapters end with things like "Borne on the wind, there came to Scripps's ears the sound of a far-off Indian war-whoop. I'm not sure where the inspiration to add this stuff came from back in , but it felt oddly familiar to me from reading online stories whose authors often beg for comments, maybe in exchange for leaving comments of their own on the readers' texts.
If this had anything to do with what Hemingway was parodying, it would be an interesting instance of author practices coming full circle, but I somehow can't be bothered to find out. Sep 18, Ben rated it did not like it Shelves: I first read this book in college, when I was consuming everything that Hemingway wrote and thought everything he wrote was spun gold. Even in that Hemingway hysteria, I hated this book.
I thought that as an adult with a better appreciation for the literary world that Hemingway was lampooning I would like it more, and after reading it for a second time, I have no idea why I thought that and want to yell at me from five days ago. It's far worse than I remember it. Do you need to spend a few hours I first read this book in college, when I was consuming everything that Hemingway wrote and thought everything he wrote was spun gold.
Do you need to spend a few hours reading a takedown of Sherwood Anderson? Have you been waiting for Sherwood Anderson to be taken down a few pegs? Do you like reading the phrase, "She was losing him" fifty thousand times? Are you comfortable with lines like "the haunting sound of a Negro laughing"? I mean, sure, you can place this book in some kind of historical context - Hem was trying to get out of his contract and wrote something that would get rejected, it was the twenties, on and on. But how many "historical context" excuses do you need to make this book make sense?
Hemingway was meticulous and wrote draft after draft of his work. His drafts and edits by Fitzgerald and Max Perkins are legendary. But, he wrote this supposedly in ten days. There is no chance it was going to be good. He didn't want it to be good. Stop saying it is good. It reads like a college improv comedy sketch with a flimsy premise that drones on for three hours.
It's kind of a bummer to see people on Goodreads saying, "This is my first book by Hemingway" and you want to message all of them and tell them about all the great stuff he wrote later, but hey, Hem published the stupid thing. I hope the twenty cents per copy that he brags about in one of the idiotic author's notes was worth it. Das nennt man wohl, mit dem falschen Buch in das neue Jahr gestartet. Somit gestaltet sich der Genuss sehr schmal, wenn man die Biografie von Ernest nicht ken Das nennt man wohl, mit dem falschen Buch in das neue Jahr gestartet. Somit gestaltet sich der Genuss sehr schmal, wenn man die Biografie von Ernest nicht kennt.
View all 4 comments. Oct 12, Mitchelle R Jansen rated it it was amazing Shelves: A book that gets your heart racing and then suddenly the author cuts you off ruining the moment. I hated the beginning Sep 09, Sylvie Spraakman rated it it was amazing.
I don't even get all the references, because I'm not a s era author, but poking fun at establishment and pretentiousness resonates with all generations. Aug 25, Corey rated it really liked it.
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What an odd, un-Hemingwayesque novella. At times I thought I had fallen into a Nathanael West absurdist comedy. I know Papa wrote it as a parody of Sherwood Anderson, but, not knowing Anderson's work well enough to 'get it,' I still thought this slim book a droll delight. May 08, Gary rated it really liked it. This book made me laugh outloud, numerous times. It's quite different then most Hemingway. It's not a serious book, it's kinda goofy,and I thought it was great fun. I read this, along with any other Hemingway books I could find, in order to better understand the woman who recommended him to me.
Having gotten through several novels and innumerable short stories by the author, I was rather startled by this, his first published novel, as it is entirely unlike everything else. Indeed, it is a sophomoric satire which I found very funny at the time although I had little idea of the literary styles Hemingway was parodying. Dec 21, Dan rated it it was ok. I read this on the redeye and I wasn't really paying attention because Dennis Rodman was making a ruckus by the bathrooms.
At any rate, I don't think satire was Hemingway's thing. If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews! Aug 25, Delara H F rated it liked it Shelves: Feb 06, James rated it it was ok. For a Hemingway way book, this is a very poor substitute for one. Every section Hemingway felt he had to do a summary and then go on an ego trip of who he knew or met.
The book itself had a poor story line. In parts Hemingway bragged it took him a few hours to write. I can truly believe that. The story themes of a relationship breaking up, working in a bean factory, the indigenous community being suppressed had all the hallmarks of an Erskine Caldwell book. Aug 25, Behnoud Shayesteh rated it liked it. How did you people laugh at it? Oct 19, Bob R Bogle rated it liked it Shelves: A rather hastily written book by Hemingway.
It's different than ususal Hemingway books. The story is light-hearted and feels incomplete. Overall, a quick read and a forgettable one too. Maybe I didn't get the context in which it was written. Didn't quite enjoy it. Waarschijnlijk doordat het een parodie op de grote schrijvers van zijn tijd is.
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Feb 18, JDR rated it it was ok Shelves: To be frank, it is a short little thing that I cannot quite classify as either good or bad but it is Hemingway and thus I was propelled through it all. The whole affair is very absurd to read, especially all the Author's notes that are left through out the text. Honestly, I could not say I would recommend this to be read by any folks who don't care to have a shelf filled with every Hemingway work. But I would recommend those who want an hour or two alone with some strange and baffling piece of w To be frank, it is a short little thing that I cannot quite classify as either good or bad but it is Hemingway and thus I was propelled through it all.
But I would recommend those who want an hour or two alone with some strange and baffling piece of written word. Aug 08, Drfine rated it really liked it.
The Torrents of Spring by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
The ratings of this book vary. Some people complain about Hemingway's writing style. These people, of course, are misguided. Other reviewers complain that the book is incomprehensible to them. They gripe that they are not familiar with the works that Hemingway was parodying; what an odd complaint to lay at an author's feet.