“My dear friend, I tell you, at times when I feel near to breaking, all the upheaval in me can be stilled by the sight of such a creature who, going her ways in happy serenity within the narrow circle of her existence, gets by from one day to the next and, seeing the leaves fall, thinks nothing other than that winter is coming.”
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
fileol
Yes this opening tempted me to break m budget and buy this book early. I keep telling myself ---after Christmas, after Christmas....but I do love the opening.
Agreed. 
It lays out the situation succinctly and establishes the voice immediately.
"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death."
- Keats x
"Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." - Percy Shelley
skyfall
I've just begun Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. I like the impact he creates in simple delivery:
"Philip opened a large cupboard filled with dresses and, stepping in, took as many of them as he could in his arms and buried his face in them. They smelt of the scent his mother used. Then he pulled open the drawers, filled with his mother's things, and looked at them: there were lavender bags among the linen; and their scent was fresh and pleasant. The strangeness of the room left it, and it seemed to him that his mother had just gone out for a walk. She would be in presently and would come upstairs to have nursery tea with him. And he seemed to feel her kiss on his lips.
"It was not true that he would never see her again. It was not true simply because it was impossible. He climbed up on the bed and put his head on the pillow. He lay there quite still."
xxx
Minnie is not practicing time management. Otherwise, pretty accurate. 
Hufflepuff! (It all leads back to Harry Potter.)
... for all those who got it, I don't get the title.
You're gonna get something! I just listened to the sample. That doesn't sound like Mark Watney! That sounds like someone reading!! "I don't blame you, and I'm glad you survived," he reads without any inflection at all. No! When you read it to yourself, you put a bit more kick in it, right? 
(Only teasing. It's a good idea, but you should read it with my Mark voice. It's a bit high-pitched, but way more like an actual martian.)
You've heard me read aloud, haven't you? Friend, I'd have you through that whole book in five minutes, and back to Hemingway. x
nonsense
Got it. Thanks!
It'll make for a lovely chat, nurse Gage
Looking forward to it. x
I kind of buy what you are saying and normally I trust your judgement above my own.
I hadn't realized. Then you should definitely read Fifty Shades of Grey next. I have read it and found it titillating. There is a gripping work called The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser which I feel certain you would enjoy. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire might make good bedtime reading. And over the summer you might dip into Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. All are my personal favorites. If you have time over the holidays I recommend The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, and you mustn't pass up the latest release of the Twilight series: it has new scenes and perspectives all through it. Good for a winter morning!
I'm not all tied up in The Martian, Dilbert. It's pop fiction, and it certainly isn't clinging to me eternally as some fine literature does. I wasn't trying to shame you with my family anecdotes yesterday. I was just sharing some of what went into the read for me beyond a sense of the structure.
I agree it's probably better to assess the structure after you've read the whole book. I'd love to discuss after you read? (I don't have a copy of my own, so I'll have to trust your remarks!) I don't think your ideas on the writing are at all off. Sometimes I can overlook the structure when the story (for me) is strong enough, especially in a work intended more for entertainment than style. I think this story did a great job building on the suspense, and you don't really get to see that fairly in the early chapters. I also feel that Mark's character (your interest in who he is at the start of the tale) is displayed through his actions as the book unfolds. I've said that the epistolary style forgives a lot of your objections (like the back-story chunk to start), but that's just my opinion. I didn't study the thing, and I read it in snatches at night right before I fell asleep. So I probably missed a lot. x
If you don't end up liking it, it's probably still a good mission for learning! The seeing what not to do.
Your questions are never unhelpful to me. They provoke me to examine my writing life.
Likewise.
Why? (for the like or the not like.) I love this opening too. Just curious for your take.
Currently, though, I am burdened with the suspicion that the biggest Hemingway devotees are Hemingway scholars, those interested readers of his fiction who also are possessed of a goodly knowledge of his life and times. Is that what great literature is?
I wouldn't think so! There's a lasting debate in literature about what great literature is, and a debate about how to approach it. Some feel that knowing the author's life sullies the work: art for art's sake! It ought to stand alone. Others find the historical perspective more rewarding than the art. Others can't imagine trying to read a work of literature without knowing the context of the author's life and times.
I don't know a great deal about Hemingway. I like his work because it was revolutionary. He was one of the Modernist writers who transformed literature. That sense that his work has barely begun and isn't quite finished? I think that was purposeful. He was coming out of the Victorian era, which wanted to tie a pretty bow around novels -- punish the bad characters, reward the good characters, and end things happily ever after. He's questioning that in his work. Is there a happily ever after? Is their justice? Is there a pretty bow at the end of the story? Or isn't life really a relentless struggle to hold yourself together and be as honorable as you can in a world which dishonors and crushes?
He was writing after The Great War shattered illusions. Everything people believed in was scattered all over the floor, including the Victorian vision. Instead of reading Dickens's novels, people are heading to the silver screen to be inspired by images which move and say nothing. I think this contributed to the way literature changed with Hemingway. He's challenging the reader to experience deeply what he leaves unsaid. Here is the stage, here are the players, they said the following, these thoughts crushed the mind, and that is all.
I'm not sure if that helps?
So, on Mars and in Georgia you'd always say;
Not always! Sometimes I say you are this, as well as a dog-day cicada AND a parrot-toed pipjenny.
Okay, okay, I kind of buy what you are saying and normally I trust your judgement above my own. I do see the need for the backstory to be put out there somehow, but I'd like to see a bit more of the man before he gives me the history of NASA.
The novel is plot-driven. It's not so much about who the man is as where he's ended up and what in the world he's going to do about it. It's not particularly well-written, but it's not meant to be literary fiction. The words do the job, as I said: they convey the tale. The opening had me bored by sixty pages in, but that's when the story picked up. (I didn't actually mind the early part of the opening, but the logs get repetitive after a while.)
My point was that, given that the author made the structural call to open in the "only person" POV, I'm not sure how else he could quickly offer back story? I was glad to get it out of the way, and I found the premise (he's writing the back-story on the off chance someone finds his log) believable.
I didn't find him unemotional about his situation? He cries in a few places, he gets extremely angry in a few places -- I can't say more without spoiling. But his personality is very much, "This is the situation I'm in. I'm going to see if I can think my way out." He doesn't spend his log saying, "This is horrible and these are all of the ways I'm scared." He uses it to say, "This is the current situation." Of course he's scared. That can be assumed.
I don't think the book would be as good restructured to a third person perspective as Vern suggests. I was bored with the back-to-back logs as it begins, but having read the whole, I can see why it opens that way.
(You bought a copy? I'm not recommending it. I'm saying I liked it.)
Never mind!!!! Try to be helpful! < --- Me I mean.
I believe it! He's got no one to talk to! The log is his only real reason to use his voice. To work out his ideas and leave a bit of himself, should the inevitable happen: a bit which with luck won't be destroyed by sand storms or quill pigs invading the planet -- or overlooked. (No one knows he survived, and who is going to waste time and money looking through old wreckage?)
The author made a structural call to begin the novel with the reader and Mark alone on Mars together. The log makes the communication from Mark to the reader personal and direct. It creates a vehicle for suspense (we find out what's gone wrong as he does), and we don't know as the novel opens more than he knows.
His personality is flippant throughout the book. That's part of his character. He begins by filling in a lot of background detail on the off-chance that someone will find the log one day and want the back story. Piping believable! Says I actually!
(I wrote that quickly! I got to run!) 
You are actually an actual toad choker!! x
