i think some of the best short stories ever written.

So, I didn’t read the Complete short stories of Hemingway. I wanted an introduction, I’d always thought of Hemingway as..well, I’d never really given him much thought. He was just someone I wasn’t interested in reading. Lord help me, I can be dense.


I’ve read about a dozen of the stories in this anthology. I asked my husband for his opinion on which ones I should start with and I think that I’ve read a fair sampling, I’ll probably continue to pick this up every now and then and throw another one down. Some of these stories are what I expected of Hemingway. When I think of him, I see a large man, with a gun and a cigar and hell bent on killing something. I see wilderness and war, I see the old sea captain and the disillusioned writer in the euro café. And sometimes I see my grandfather but that just might be the Gary Cooper influence.


I was expecting the hunting, fishing, wilderness angle and The Big Two Hearted River Part I & II delivered with a yawn. The morality of The Good Lion and The Faithful Bull was fine and dandy and the cleverness of Homage to Switzerland wasn't lacking. These stories didn't give me that jaw dropping, must read everything effect that I so often hope for, but they were well written and entertaining.. Mostly, they were short and bearable.


Now the ones that I can truly say blew my Havana lovin', Zelda hatin', Hemingway image apart were A Day's Wait, a quick 4 page story about a child thinking he is about to die and how he prepares for this. I was impressed with the emotion that was so quickly and brilliantly emoted. I remember when I was about six or so, I swallowed a penny and thought I was going to die. It's not a good feeling, people. I remember standing over my parent's bed trying to prep them for this. I totally relate to Schatz.


And the acerbic tone in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Seeing-Eyed Dog, Hills like White Elephants, and The Snows of Kilamanjaro were awesome. I've always been down with the cynical, the mean-spiritedness, and this somewhat frightens me that I'm so attracted to it, because I'm really trying to be a better person. Hell if I can't enjoy some of the nastiness.


My favorite of the bunch is the first story that I was told to read.. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. I'm sure many of you goodreaders are already aware of this gem, but I have to say even late to the game, I was just stunned by it. So short and so poignant. So beautiful. It makes me want to take on a sugar daddy so I can sit in European cafés mumbling nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.


I'm such a girl.

All of the stories in this omnibus collection are good, and many are great- among the best short stories I've ever read. Worth reading several times are: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", and "Hills Like White Elephants"- each is a masterpiece. New to me in this volume were Hemingway's stories of the Spanish Civil War, which are a great compliment to "For Whom The Bell Tolls", and several stories he wrote later in his life- many are set in Cuba or during the Second World War. If there's a common theme to all of these stories, it's Hemingway's deep appreciation for human frailty and human dignity. Whether he's writing about bullfighting or hunting or war or relations between men and women, you can't help but admire his characters, despite the futility and despair that marks much of their circumstances.

The Germans we saw coming now were on bicycles. There were four of them and they were in a hurry too but they were very tired. They were not cyclist troops. They were just Germans on stolen bicycles. The leading rider saw the fresh blood on the road and then he turned his head and saw the vehicle and he put his weight hard down on his right pedal with his right boot and we opened on him and on the others. A man shot off a bicycle is always a sad thing to see, although not as sad as a horse shot with a man riding him nor a milk cow gut-shot when she walks into a fire fight

Of course it’s Hemingway so there are lots of great stories in this comprehensive collection and I certainly gained a greater appreciation of his writing style. Some of the best stories were published posthumously and his early stories still feel pretty fresh even after 80 years since their first publication.

Here are the stories from this collection that I enjoyed most.

1. The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Perhaps Hemingway’s most famous short story and for good reason. This story feels both personal and visceral as we witness a man dealing with the advanced stages of gangrene - all in the shadow of Africa’s highest peak.


2. On the Quai at Smyrna

This terror filled sketch doubles as a history lesson. It takes place over a few hours on the Quai as Greek citizens are being evacuated in 1922 from Smyrna after they were abandoned by the Allies and defeated in their war with Turkey.

3. Indian Camp

A well known Nick Adams story. When Nick is young an Indian man approaches his father for help. They all travel by canoe to find out what has happened at the Indian village. Nick’s father is not happy with what he finds at the camp. A coming of age story.

4. Big Two-Hearted River Part I and II

Hemingway’s most beautiful story although really more of a sketch. A man is fly fishing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and is trying to escape his PTSD. It is almost as if this story was written by a naturalist. Hemingway takes great care in his writing to describe both the landscape and fly fishing in minute detail.

5. The Killers

Possibly the most dramatic short story in the collection and one of Hemingway’s most imaginative. This was required reading in my high school lit class and I was on the edge of my seat from the time the killers first walked into the diner.

6. The Denunciation

Takes place during Spain’s Civil War which Hemingway saw first hand. In this story the protagonist meets a friend at a Republican bar. While chatting the protagonist notices that there is an also an old schoolmate who is there in disguise and the man is one of Franco's fascists. So the protagonist is faced with a dilemma of whether to report his old classmate to the authorities. If he does the man will most likely be shot .

7. Under the Ridge

Also set in the Spanish Civil War, this story involves a Spanish soldier who doesn’t like any foreigners including the American who is fighting along side him against the Fascists.

8. Black Ass at the Crossroads

An American platoon sets up an ambush against Germans at a road crossing. Graphic story that takes place near the end of WWII.

I recently upgraded my rating to 5 stars (originally 4 stars). Many of these stories are too special.

5 stars

Love Hemingway, so easily a 5 star. The first 49 short stories were a rehash for me, but well worth it. A few gems at the end I'd never read before, too. Many, if not all of these stories, I believe are very much autobiographical so one can learn much about Mr. Hemingway's life here. I wonder if it's true that he had 11 shorts, some poems and his first novel lost when thrown out by his woman of the time; copies and all as depicted in the last story.

I've heard several people lately complaining that Hemingway "hated women" and wonder if any of you think that's true.

I'm a huge fan of all of Hemingway's works, but this one takes the top. The stories in here are so moving, so real, vividly portraying all kinds of manifestations of human nature. Could talk about these works forever. Each story has so much meaning packed as densely as possible into every bit of text. Any one could easily be analyzed for an entire semester in a college literature class. I'd love to suggest one, but to I wouldn't want to take away from any of the others; each story has something new to tell.

These works are an extensive philosophy and commentary on human nature. They are sobering, brutal, tragic, poignant and beautiful. You will learn more about yourself from reading these. As an even greater value, these works are a series of windows into Hemingway's mind and soul. You can here him in every character's dialog, feel his thrall with every irony.

I highly suggest this compilation for anyone, but especially for someone trying to better understand Hemingway, his contemporaries, or 20th century western culture.

tI've been reading Hemingway's complete short stories just to see if I'd been judging him too harshly all these years. It appears I haven't been judging him harshly enough. What kind of mass hypnosis are the people under who insist Hemingway innovated a lean, economical style--'the Iceberg style', which was named 'multum in parvo' in Ancient Rome and described a style thousands of years old even then? 'A Reader Writes' is one and three quarter pages long, and only the letter embedded in it is necessary to tell the story; the frame device is a laborious description of the letter writer deciding to write to an advice columnist in the newspaper, followed by an even more laborious account of her thoughts after writing the letter, none of which adds anything to the thought process already revealed in the letter. It would be a slight enough story even at half a page, but that's its correct length, and it's typical of the percentagest in more serious, and lengthier, stories such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. On average his best stories are about twice as long as they should be if his aim is any degree of concision.

tI'll grant you though that it's hard to say in some cases how much overwritten a story is because his other consuming vice, a persistent mislaying of tone and emphasis, makes it difficult to know what was intended, and therefore what the natural length of the story might have been. 'A Natural History of the Dead' starts out promising, and might have turned out remarkable if he'd kept to his initial idea--describing the battlefields he's witnessed from the laconic, emotionless perspective of a scientist, a satiric technique that if well handled produces a mood the opposite of detachment (see Swift's A Modest Proposal). Alas, unlike Swift, Hemingway is concerned to make it impossible for literal-minded readers to think badly of him as coldblooded, so he keeps breaking in with sentimental effusions. The flaccid floundering this occasions is not pretty to watch:

t"Most of those mules that I saw dead were along mountain roads or lying at the foot of steep declivities whence they had been pushed to rid the road of their encumbrance. They seemed a fitting enough sight in the mountains where one is accustomed to their presence and looked less incongruous there than they did later, at Smyrna, where the Greeks broke the legs of all their baggage animals and pushed them off the quay into the shallow water to drown. The numbers of broken-legged mules and horses drowning in the shallow water called for a Goya to depict them. Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say that they called for a Goya, since there has been only one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight but, more likely, would, if they were articulate, call for some one to alleviate their condition."

tThe sentimental overwriting, far from taking you viscerally into the pity and horror of the scene, has the opposite effect--blocking even an effective picture arising in the mind's eye (sure, I can do Ernest bloated too).

tGoya understood multum in parvo far better than Hemingway ever did. Find a well-printed copy of 'Los Caprichios' and take your mind off this bloated nonsense.

Gelmiş geçmiş en büyüklerden biridir Hemingway. Taklit edilemez, yaptığı bir daha yapılamaz. Onunla başlamış ve bitmiştir. İlk okuyuşumuzda çoğumuz "peh, bu mu yani?" der. Araya yıllar ve bambaşka yazarlar girer. Sonra bir dürtü ile Hemingway tekrar okunur. Hissettiğimiz, yıllar önce asi ve küstah bir genç olarak evin kapısını çarpıp giden ve yıllar sonra başı utançla hafif öne eğik bir şekilde geri dönen kişinin hissettiğine yakındır.

4.5/5
Hemingway. Maskülen, naif üstelik aynı zamanda minimal diyalog ustası. Tabii içi boşaltılmış bir minimallik değil söz konusu olan. Tınısı çok başka. Öyle ki bana diyaloglardan keyif almanın nasılını öğretti. Öykülerdeki diyaloglardan tek bir cümleyi gün içinde öylesine kurup durduğum da oldu. Hemingway bantın başını bulmak gibi, gerisi geliyor. Melankolisi, buruk neşesi, zaman zaman beliren cümbüşüyle.

Başucumda kesin kalacaklar:
Klimanjaro’nun Karları
Bir şeylerin Sonu
Yağmurda Bir Kedi
Katiller
Bir Günlük Bekleyiş
İyi Kalpli Aslan

‘Neydi ki yeteneği? Yetenekti, tamam ama onu kullanmak yerine ondan faydalanmıştı. Yaptığı değil, yapabildiği şey olmuştu hep.’
Harrmngway

As you note in the date started and the date finished, I read this complete (!) volume of the short stories of Ernest Hemingway which runs 650 pages using relatively fine print. The compilation is of 71 stories. I have not read much of Hemingway for some time (one of my top five authors) so it was nice to "get back" to him. But it is a great effort to read them all.

My favorites are "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", "The Killers", "The Last Good Country" and "A Clean Well-lighted Place".

A few passages were especially strong for me:

1. From "Nobody Ever Dies", " Where you die does not matter, if you die for liberty. Anyway, the thing to do is live and not die. They did not go to die. They went to fight. The dying is an accident."

2. From "The Last Good Country", "He had already learned there was only one day at a time and that it was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far."

There is a note in the volume of short stories that says "The Last Good Country" was originally published in "The Nick Adams Stories", which I had read before. But it says "this short story was left uncompleted by Hemingway." There isn't any evidence noted as to this assertion. For me, the story does feel complete as the reader is left to formulate what the future of Nickie and his sister Littless will encounter in their adventure to the "last good country." This is very much one of my top five favorite Hemingway short stories.

3. In "The Strange Country" (the last story in the volume), Hemingway writes about one of the most tragic events of his life. I may be overstating that because he certainly recovered to become a Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winner. It relates the event of Hadley Richardson (his first wife) deciding to put all of his work to date in a suitcase (originals and copies!) to take to him on a visit to Switzerland. The suitcase was lost (stolen) from a train car that Hadley has vacated for just a short time. We can only imagine who took the suitcase and what they did with the contents when the suitcase was opened. Here are the passages:

"I [Hemingway] knew everything I hade ever written and everything that I had great confidence in was gone. I had rewritten them so many times and gotten them just how I wanted them and I knew I could not write them again because once I had them right. I forgot them completely and each time I ever read them I wondered at them and at how I had ever done them."

"She was a fine woman and I felt better already because I knew there was only on thing to do; to start over. But I did not know if I could do it. They were the things I had known best and had been closest to and several were about the first war. Writing them I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had written and rewritten until I was all in them and all gone out of me."

Hemingway (probably when he was drunk), blamed the lost of the suitcase for the failure of his first marriage.

4. In "Black Ass at the Crossroads", "It was just one of those things that you omit to do and that stay with you." I can assure you that I have never forgotten some things that I should have done (or not done) that have never left my memory.

ON A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SCALE (!), over many years I have tried to be careful when I am writing anything in making sure I have a back-up copy because when I don't and something disappears, I have great difficulty making it quite the same as I had wanted in the first place. Wouldn't if be totally fantastic if that suitcase were to be found somewhere in Paris today even though it is now almost one hundred years later.

Included here are some of the finest and most influential American short stories of the 20th century, from Big-Two Hearted River, Parts 1 and 2 to A Clean Well Lighted Place, as well as some of the most famous, A Cat in the Rain, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Killers, and more. This anthology published in 1987 includes all the stories from In Our Time, Men Without Women, and Winner Take Nothing, as well as those added in The First Forty-Nine Short Stories collection and those included in various posthumous collections The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War and The Nick Adams Stories. To make it complete it includes stories that were published in magazines but not ever gathered in a collection and some never published works. So, unless the suitcase that Hadley Hemingway lost in the 1920s with all of her husband’s writings in it ever surfaces, these seventy stories are as full of a collection as we will ever have.

There were no surprises re-reading many of these stories for the third or fourth time, just added appreciation at Hemingway’s craft. His spare, dynamic prose, the simple natural description that resonates like a Cezanne landscape or still life, his enigmatic way with dialogue that seems both commonplace and unique at the same time, and the way he invests us in the life of a waiter who wants to be a bullfighter, a couple having a dispute at a train station, the young Nick Adams at various points in his life, and various characters who suffer from insomnia or are in the middle of some battle with life’s indifference. Hemingway was a writer who strove for a painter’s effects using words to do in sentences want painters did with line and color. Cezanne, Braque, Picasso, Miro, and others were his masters. This collection attests to the fact that he joined them as a master in his own form.

It's been a while since I've read Hemingway and I wanted to revisit some of the classics ("The Short and Happy Life of...", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro and especially the Nick Adams stories) and see how they held up for me. I wanted to see if they still moved me the way they did when I was a young man deeply impressed and obsessed with Mailer, HST, Bukowski, Hemingway---the larger than life American literary alphas with their brash prose, the booze, the guns, the women, the big game hunt for the perfect boiled down line of whiskey-soaked, testosterone-fueled bravado.
Hemingway's writing read a lot different to me now at 35 then it did at 19. The subject matter did not magically change over time; guns, booze, machismo and women but there is a lot more going on here than just that. Things that I couldn't have seen between the lines with much less life under my belt at age 19 or 20. The sorrow of failed relationships, the difficult ladders and pitfalls that people climb, descend and confuse when navigating the treacherous territory of pride, dignity, disgrace and regret, the sinking of the spirit to fully have lived in and of the world of your time and then witness it changing before your eyes into something you comprehend less and less.
When I was younger the prose seemed like a bold and masculine statement, an angry and burning defiance against the world, now they seem elegant and clean, a sorrowful reduced wisdom almost like minimalist poetry or Haiku. I found the author's heart to be much more open, melancholy and freely given in the white of the page between the black exacting lines of text. Perhaps I am simply more able to read "deeply" now than I was at 20, I'm sure that is true but Hemingway's work has also been so enduring in part because of this reflective quality. A work that you can come back to throughout your life and consistently find different kinds of wisdom in each time must surely be the watermark of a genius.
The Nick Adams stories are a timeless, collective masterpiece. They and much of the collected work here are a magical portal into another time in the world. The last moments of "the old world" before the 20th century grinds up to the speed of light. Most of the stories were written and set in the 20s and 30s before World War 2. From our vantage point in the 21st century they seem charged with the electricity of world-wide historical and cultural change that is welling up above them in an unseen tidal wave about to block out their particular sun and then crash down and wipe everything that came before clean and roaring into "a new world". The tales of growing up in the wild and barely settled territory of turn of the century Midwest America, of hunting charging Bull Elephants head-on with a rifle, jet setting in prop planes and ocean liners with great young artists and writers, the bull fights, the war trenches, mariticide in exotic locations, the adventures through "old Europe"--it's all so distant from the plugged in, dialed up, speed of light world we live in that in Hemingway's deep, still, clear water prose the locations and the subject matter feel almost like myth or magic now. It's a beautiful trip into another world, almost another dimension.