Peoples Choice 2010: End of a Holiday

By Alexandra Sides

“Hemingway has moments of genius,” I said. “Like when he talks about the shell exploding when he has taken his ambulance to the front and he says it is as if a furnace door was opened for a second – I don’t know what wars are like, or shells, or explosions but I know the heat and roar of a furnace and the way he writes that one tiny thing makes me feel it.”
Oliver rubbed at his chin and smiled. “What else? Tell me something else.” He sipped his wine. Talking about writers makes me feel intelligent.” He laughed.
“Well, I wanted to tell you, to break it to you.. that Tolstoy was a woman. He writes things that no man could possibly know, things that no woman I think even realises until she sees them written and then she knows they are true.”

“What things?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You have to now, baby you can’t leave me hanging.” He reached out across the table to take my hand, pushing my fingers back one after the other. But I won’t tell him about the feeling of revulsion the Kitty feels sometimes for Levin, how the squirming of her stomach is sometimes more disgust than desire. And who told Tolstoy about it? Did he still love her after?

“Tell me.”

“Just the way he describes a girl’s body language, how she leans back in her chair and how her hands fall – he doesn’t need to say how unhappy she is, I know because I know how it feels to sit like that. It is like grief. He can’t have made that up. He must have watched someone’s heart break.”

Oliver sighs a little.

“Hemingway got in trouble for describing his friends in Paris.”
“Will you put me in a story? We would make a great story.”