u/JohnLakeman668

I’m curious if people thinks that it makes sense for most of the characters to have British accents.

The wizard community is largely shown to be completely isolated from the Muggles Community and they have been for hundreds of years. They seem completely unaware of most day to day Muggle items and habits. I remember once the daily profit has to explain what a gun is.

I’m not sure that in isolation, it makes sense that they would have developed a parallel accent. Modern British accents have their roots in received pronunciation which was introduced in the mid 19th century long after the schism between most of the wizard population being around muggles.

Obviously there are a lot of muggle born students (I think I saw 10-20%) but they generally assimilate themselves so I don’t see them being a big enough population to bring their regional accents developed until age 11 into the mix and have them stick with the wider population.

Starting with the caveat that I’m a fan of Hemingway and I’ve read and enjoyed most of his work including the short stories. I’ve always put off Green Hills of Africa since it’s generally considered one of his worst but I recently picked it up.

Currently about 2/3rds of the way through it and the first thing that struck me was how often stories are framed as people clamoring for him to go on long diatribes about topics and him getting annoyed.(Kandinsky and various locals spring to mind)

What really struck me is what he leaves out and what he forgets to leave out. The other characters are constantly calling him out for boasting about how good of a bird shot he is when he’s drunk and a few other things.

The little comments they make are funny and humanize him in a way but it destroys the illusion he tries to convey that everyone is clamoring for his insight and approval. I can see why he leaves these drunken ramblings out but it completely changes the dynamic of how other characters are responding to him and their behavior in general.

I just came to another scene where they meet some villagers and Pop is having a conversation with them

. Hem is constantly interjecting and asking Pop to translate nonsense and Hemingway doesn’t seem to notice how clearly annoying this is to Pop.

Altogether, it just makes a tough read even tougher because you have to get through so much pensive and articulate dialogue that a person wouldn’t actually ever say and ignore so much of what is clearly happening.

It’s possible that he meant for the reader to see through this but from what we know of him alienating all of his friends at the time, I don’t think he had the self awareness for that.