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Title: A great Naturalist
Review: Hemingway sets a mood nonpareil in 20th Century literature in the first paragraph of this novel: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders...water was clear and swiftly moving in the channels...and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves." The first chapter of FTA sets a mood of doom that pervades the rest of the novel. I have a real problem with Hemingway's metaphysical musings (the world breaks you, et. al.), but for clarity and objectivity in prose, Hemingway stands as a giant in literature. This is a great book, abeit a supremely depressing read. Read it for the style, not the substance.
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