The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway Charles Scribner's Sons
The story goes that, in 1925, a young Ernest Hemingway had just signed a contract with minor publisher Boni & Liveright. His first book, a collection of short stories and vignettes titled In Our Time, was released to wide acclaim for its sparse prose and convincing characters.
At the time, Hemingway was working on what was to be his breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises, but the attention his first collection received had reached the higher-ups at rival publishing house Scribner's. They quickly made him a better offer, and knowing the only way to get out of his commitment was by submitting a novel so offensive that Boni & Liveright would have no choice but to break his contract, Hemingway spent 10 days writing The Torrents of Spring.
The novel was a parody of the era's crop of best-selling novelists - pretentious authors who pompously equated their characters' minor struggles with that of life's most philosophical questions. With their grandiose themes and florid language, they were the antithesis of Hemingway's soon-to-be-popular stark style, and the author used their sentimental silliness to craft a biting satire of all that was wrong in his world of literature.
The bare-bones plot, in which two disenchanted war veterans search endlessly for the ideal woman before spring hits, is epic in its maudlin absurdity: blue-collar characters longing for love spout poetry as if everyone in the world speaks in such ornate tongues; others recollect physically impossible memories of their homes being reduced to ashes during the civil war. At one point, one of the leads becomes obsessed with the intellectual world of literary circles.
These bizarre quirks alone make the novel amusing, but peppered throughout the story are a series of comical notes from Hemingway, an exaggerated 'writer's commentary' that turns the overly ponderous novel into a mad piece of meta-fiction. From a brief explanation of his writing process followed by a detailed list of his eating habits, to straight-up asking the readers if they're enjoying the novel so far, the author's asides are farcically hilarious. Hemingway even suggests: 'If any of the readers would care to send me anything they wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Cafe du Dome any afternoon.'
