I'd guess he is not too young, but don't blame me if he hates it.

>I was at the perfect age--twenty-one--when I read The Magic Mountain

What a strange coincidence. When I was 21, I watched "The Magic Mounting" on video.

But that was a horse of an entirely different color (so to speak).

Please allow me to draw the curtain of Christian charity on that tawdry scene, a sad chapter in the book of my misspent youth.

I was about that age when I read it and I liked it well enough. It's a bit more swashbuckling and a bit less world-weary than most of Hemingway. At a later age he might understand it better but not enjoy it as much.

It would help if he already knows where the noses go.

I read it at 15 and enjoyed it tremondously, even if I didn't know all the ins and outs of Facist v. Communist v. Anarchist Spain at the time. The important thing is that Hemingway is honest enough not to make the work a mere propaganda piece despite his undoubted sympathies for the Republican cause even in its Leninist phases. I still remember the church desecration/massacre scene vividly.

Hemingway's sensibility was adolescent, so it's not like there are a lot of depths and subtleties that'll only be grasped by an adult. I remember enjoying _For Whom_ when I was maybe 15 or 16. And his kitschier stuff like _The Old Man and the Sea_ probably shouldn't be read by anyone *over* 14. Some books want to be read early. I didn't get to _On the Road_ 'til I was 30 by which point I no longer found that sort of thing charming. But at 15 I would've loved it.

For Graham Greene or Ralph Ellison you need to have been out in the world a few years. It would be interesting to attempt a list of novels and ideal reading ages -- maybe someone out there has done it.

I was about that age when I read, and I didn't get it. The bowdlerised language and romantic idealism seemed silly to me.

I enjoyed Dostoevsky's "Idiot" much more. How much cynicism does he have an appetite for? :)

Just for god's sake don't tell him the ending -- it tolled for thee! (Never saw it coming.)

I myself liked Ball Four.

Have you given him Ender's Game yet? Not exactly in the same league as Hemingway, but 14 is probably the perfect age.

I read "the magic mountain" while I was deployed to Desert Storm to do engineering work on battle damaged airplanes. It seemed like a metaphor for my existence at the time, alternating between boredom and terror. But the war didn't set me free like it did Hans Castorp.

I wasn't ready at 14, but at 16 it left such a powerful impression on me that it lingers in my memory even today. A beautiful, beautiful book. He can try. I guess the only danger is that if he loses interest now he won't want to pick it up later. If it's too early, he'll know in 30 pages or so and just make sure he picks it up again in two years!

Tell him he should read "The Things They Carried."
14 is just exactly the age you want to innoculate boys against bullshit romantic imges of manliness and war.

I'm not clear about the "ready" part: if he's asking, he's interested, and why stand in his way? He'll soon find out if he's "ready".

And the "spoil" makes you sound like you're in the "Literature as spinach" school: it's good for him -- in some, vague self-improved morality way -- and he must not be scared off from developing the proper tastes. I say, expose him to anything and everything -- high culture and/or complex --- with the explicit option that if it's too much, he can be allowed to put it down until he feels he's ready for it and not be forced to plow through it (explicitly or implicitly) because he feels he must.(1) As long as he retains the relevant intellectual curiosity about literature, the world, and how things work in it, and won't settle for simple answers, he'll be fine, in my opinion.

Speaking of simple answers, I *would* advise locking up the Ayn Rand, though: THAT could tragically warp a young mind.

(1)Unless it's a short attention span thing, of course, which ought to be overcome.

My 14-year old would be too young. He would read it as an adventure story. I would think 16-but maybe your boy is more mature.

You don't tell us what adult literature he's liked. Has he read All Quiet on the Western Front?

Where we live the kids read The Moon Is Down in 8th grade. This proves to be surprisingly difficult.

When you're fourteen, you're supposed to read page-turners. If he gets to page ten, it's a winner.

"I enjoyed Dostoevsky's 'Idiot' much more." Oh my, so did I at that age and after. Somehow I have never found Hemingway memorable. There is a profound coldness to the writing, to Hemingway's care for characters. I must try again, I suppose. Remember, Don Quizote is 400 years old and Edith Grossman has a wonderful anniversary translation that I only wish would not end. I read Don Quixote about 14. But, we can always return to a writer.

If he can read it, if he does read it, then he is old enough. I know a writer who regrets the passing of the time when books meant something - when their publication were epoch shaping events. He would be much gratified to learn that they still have the ability to ruin somebody for life.

I read The Magic Mountain when I was in 10th grade, and I thought it was the worst 900 pages I had ever read. Should it give it another shot?

"The Sun Also Rises" is better (and shorter), and can also serve as a prelude if he wants to continue with the later and fatter ones.
I read "Women in Love" at 22 and again 15 years later, and realized how much I had missed (and was shocked at how much I'd learned) in the interim. Grateful I read Tolkien at 10. Proust at one gulp is OK after 35, say, but better measured out, by volume, over a few years after that; takes time to coalesce.
Teacher of mine told us we would never understand "Lear" until we had children - now I think he was probably right, if brutal.
The Sea of Stories - where's the compass?

Hey praktike - yeah, give "The MM" another shot - geez, 10th grade? That must have been murder! Get the John Woods trans. in Vintage, tho - it's so much better than the old ones - sly and funny and sexy, too.

I read For Whom the Bell Tolls at just about that age (maybe 15) and found it deeply moving. I may have been spoiled for life, but it certainly wasn't because of that experience. To this day, it's the only Hemingway I can stand. Making the reasonable assumption that your son is relatively smart and precocious, it shouldn't be any problem.

Toss him Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as some more factual background to the Spanish Civil War -- I found that as a kid, one of the larger obstacles to a lot of literature was not having the background knowledge to know what was supposed to be happening.

Read the facts first and then the fiction? I usually have done things the other way around. Similarly, reading the original book after seeing the film adaptation is often superior to the other way around.

When I was a teenager, I was very bookish (the only one on this forum, right?) but I was always irritated that jr. high and high school teachers wanted us to read great lit when I wanted to read science fiction. I knew the SF was not, by and large, great lit, but I knew that most of my fellow students were even less likely to appreciate the great lit than I was. If they read anything it was going to be a bonus.

Hemingway is v overrated. At 14 he should be ready for Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Tell him that he mustn't read it: that should do the trick.

"The Sea of Stories - where's the compass?" Nice :)

Having read Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' at age 15 and enjoying it tremendously, I think we have an implicit reading recommendation here. 'Crime and Punishment' is one of the all-time great page-turners at that age as well.

i worked as a book peddlar for ten years a decade ago and when when teenage boys asked for recommendations (hey, i was the "cool" clerk wearing Coltrane t-shirts) i'd steer them towards "Nick Adam" stories first then "On the Road" then Orwell...it seemed to work, 'cause a bunch of those kids are now friends. i just re-read a bunch of Hemingway last year (as i was hiking the camino de santiago) and found he holds up well, especially Sun Also Rises and "Short Happy Life..." though i dunno if either would have been as effective if i were still an adolescent.

He is not to young. To think that he is is to embrace "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Let kids develop on their own time, at their own pace.

Following up on sm's post, while I enjoyed SF when I was twelve (which according to David Hartwell is the 'golden age' of science fiction) and loved reading Jack Vance's ornate fantasies, I have to say I'm a bit put off by much of today's SF&F. OTOH, my 21-y.o. stepson is tearing through Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy at the moment, so I may just be turning into an old fart.

He can always re-read the book, you know. I read "Madame Bovary" in high school and thought it was insufferably dull. I read it again as a junior in college, and thought it mildly interesting but certainly no wonder. I read it a third time when I was 40 and I couldn't put it down.

At any rate, really fine books improve and show new aspects upon re-reading--and not just classics. I had a similar experience with "Morte d'Urban," by J.F. Powers. In later readings, the reader brings more to the reading, which changes the view of the book.

Not too young at all if he has a passion for books, which I suspect he does if he is even asking about it at all.

Personally, I think For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway's best work. I loved it even if I didn't fully understand the politics involved and I have read it several times since then. It keeps getting better and better the more real world experience I bring to it.

The scene where the villagers round up the "fascists" is one of the most terrifying things I ever read as a teenager. It has lost some power with repeated re-readings, but, I still recall the horrible fascination I felt the first time I read that passage.

Some later Twain perhaps?
Loren Eisley? Maybe for later.
I enjoyed Hemingway at that age.
I second the notion that he should
give it a try and see what happens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/opinion/16wed4.html

The Point of Miss Gould's Pencil
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

I never met Miss Gould. But deep in a box at home are the proofs of articles I once wrote for The New Yorker, and in the margins is the handwriting of Eleanor Gould Packard - the magazine's venerable arbiter of style, who died on Sunday at 87. I thought I knew a lot about the English language at the time. I had a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton, an old-fashioned kind of doctorate with an emphasis on literary history and textual editing. So it came as a surprise to see those proofs. Broader questions had been settled. But it was clear from Miss Gould's annotations - her very direct strictures - that a few details of syntax, usage and logic still needed to be fixed.

I reacted the way I suppose many writers did when they first saw a Gould proof - with disbelief and dismissal. But a writer soon learns to welcome anyone who can offer real insight into the nature of prose, and that Miss Gould could certainly do. I learned from her neatly inscribed comments that even though I was writing correctly - no syntactical flat tires, no grammatical fender-benders - I was often not really listening to what I was saying. That may seem impossible to a reader who isn't a writer. But Miss Gould's great gift wasn't taking writers seriously. It was taking their words seriously. No writer, at first, is quite prepared for that.

Miss Gould managed to seem larger than life without ever leaving the margins of the unpublished page. To some people, I suspect, she came to embody the negative image of the copy editor: punctilious, schoolmarmish and blue-stockinged. But the grasp she had on the written word, on the inner springs and impulses of the language, made grammar and syntax and diction resemble the laws of physics. From one angle, those laws mark the limits of nature. From another angle, they define the very energies that shape the universe and make it intelligible.

Glad to see another Vance reader here. About 5 years ago I was frightened by the realization that I found Vance's view (in his SF particularly) of how people and societies act and are motivated more realistic than most other authors'.

I still enjoy his stuff but now see it as reportage on the human condition.

One of my favourite aspects of Hemingway is that his books can be read at various level (always the sign of a good book). I read "For Whom.." at 14 and then reread it at 30, I enjoyed it tremendously both times. Obviously at 15 you probably look more to the build up of the action and the storyline and at 30 you can place it in a better historical context.
My advice is to let him go ahead.

My son is a big Hemingway fan at 15 and change; he read For Whom the Bell Tolls while still 14, I think. Interesting to see all the early Dostoevsky readers here--he's currently reading, and loving, The Brothers Karamazov.

By the way, I can say from my own experience that 14 is an ideal age for Kafka and Borges.

A fourteen-year-old who wants to read should be permitted to read whatever he wants. If you are worried, discuss it with him afterwards. My parents', grandprents', uncles' and aunts' libraries were always wide-open to me and did me a world of good. As Thomas Mann said in his Doctor Faustus (and put it into the mouth of the high school teacher Serenus Zeitbloom): eventually the lacunae of understanding will most likely fill up.

By the way, I too read The Magic Mountain first at age 21, in the concetration camp of Bergen-Belsen, of all places. It was given to me by a fellow-inmate in a one-volume limp parchment bound india-paper edition. It definitely helped me by adding to my will to survive. I wish I still had it. Unfortunately, due to the dysentery raging in the camp, eventually I had to use it up as toilet paper. Habent sua fata libelli...

My fourteen year old and I have just finished reading The Maltese Falcon in honor of the 75th anniversary of its release.

The book, or I should say the language of the book, has been a revelation for him. Most of his fiction reading have been classics, but now he has fallen for Hammet's direct but playful and ironic style. For the first time he is reading for the love of the language and not merely for the plot.

I think Brad's question is not whether he should be allowed to read it, but that will it be a waste of time.

For what it's worth, I tried reading For Whom the Bell Tolls at about the same age as your son, Brad, but I never got past age 30.

Thomas T. Schweitzer

As Thomas Mann said in his Doctor Faustus (and put it into the mouth of the high school teacher Serenus Zeitbloom): eventually the lacunae of understanding will most likely fill up.

By the way, I too read The Magic Mountain first at age 21, in the concetration camp of Bergen-Belsen, of all places. It was given to me by a fellow-inmate in a one-volume limp parchment bound india-paper edition. It definitely helped me by adding to my will to survive.

- Thank you.

Does your son feel the intense emotional repression of being male? If so, then he will surely find Hemingway a hero. If not, then he'll probably be left with an appreciation for the style of Hemingway, but probably not much more. Have him read up on the battle of Waterloo, on Wellington and Napoleon instead.

I think the "First 49 Stories" would be ideal; written whilst Hemingway's bullshit filter was reasonably intact

Mein Gott, die "Zauberburg".

I tried to read Mann's novel--twice--and the second time, when Hans Castorp is just lying in that fucking sanitorium, listening to dreary Europeans go on and on and on and....for 10 pages about the nature of time, I just want to hit them, repeatedly. And when, in the edition I read, I realized that Hans' declaration of love was going to last 10 pages, in *unstranslated French*, I threw the book against the wall and haven't picked it up since. Besides, Mann's best book is either the one about Schoenberg and the 12-tone system, "Dr. Faustus" or the brilliant "Death in Venice".

Brad, here's my $0.02:

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is fine for a 14 yr-old boy raised in an academic's home. It's good to set the bar a bit high, and better to learn of recent conflicts like the Spanish Civil War through fiction than through dreary ideology-soaked history lessons such as I'm guessing he'd get in the Berkeley public schools. The most important attributes of a good writer for young adults are vivacity and clarity of prose and intensity of the imagined world. So if he likes FWTBT, then give him Conrad's "Nostromo" or "The Secret Agent." And if he hasn't read Dumas, then by all means he should do so now.

Other recommendations for a 14 year-old boy:
--Tolstoy, "Hadji Murat"
--"Don Quixote"
--anything by Stanislaw Lem
--"Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass"
--Kipling, "The Man Who Would Be King"
--The Odyssey
--Graham Greene, "Travels With My Aunt" and short stories
--Joyce, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
--Gerald Green, "The Last Angry Man" and (forget exact title) "To Brooklyn With Love"

To be avoided (too early):
--Dostoevsky
--Mann
--Flaubert

To be avoided (too facile, trite, cloying)
--Fitzgerald
--Brautigan, Vonnegut
--Salinger (dated; prose now appears lame)

He should certainly read Hemingway, and whatever else he wants. I'd start worrying if he began displaying an inordinate interest in the metaphysical poets, but otherwise, read, read, read.

I first read Hemingway when I was about your boy's age. I lived on the west side of Chicago during the summer of the Democratic Convention. My neighborhood was violent with failing schools and a pervasive sense of pointlessness. But 37 years later, I vividly recall "Big Two Hearted River," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well Lighted Place" and that through those books, and many others, I became a person.

Yeah, I'm OK with Hemingway.