8/10 Overall

This old man on the sea fares somewhat better than I thought he would, and somewhat worse. Like Dickens, or Hemingway himself, I'm of two minds on everything -- certainly on every single story that I've read here. I will also repeat myself, repeatedly, if you'll forgive me, because, again like Hemingway, that seems to be the only way to get a point across.

What works best in Hemingway is that the reader is required to engage fully, or you'll miss the boat, if you'll forgive the watery metaphor that Old H uses quite too often. You can't ignore a word, not a syllable -- not even a grammatical anomaly, because as sparingly as he writes, everything is worth something, and everything reminds you of something. Let your mind wander, even briefly, at your own peril in H's works because sure as the sun (also) rises, you'll regret it 10 pages in, and you'll have to go back to check if he really said what you thought he said.

Pay attention. He requires it. Even if it's just about a cat in the rain.

H offered his own guide, much like the ones who drove him and his mates across the savannahs: "I'm cool. I'm so cool, in fact, I'm like an iceberg." Everything happens on the tippy top of every story. The rest, folks, you'll have to dig out for yourselves. Careful, though. Lots of buried landmines. If you don't watch out, you'll have the whole thing explode in your face.

He tears my heart out at every turn; he bores me senseless on some trips; he enrages me to the very roots of my hair on others.

In One Trip Across for instance, I wanted to set fire to him, his narrator, his ship, his crew, and sail merrily away into the sunset, whistling. This disgusting racist pig was writing one of the best short stories written in the 20th century, and we had praised him for it. I'd never read the story, only watched the film To Have and Have Not (which was based on this story, along with The Tradesman's Return,) and so had no idea of the undercurrent that swirled around this particular iceberg.

Therein lies the duality, the complexity of my relationship with Hemingway. The racism, the bigotry, the misogyny all rear their ugly heads in various stories; side by side with moments of extreme tenderness and friendship, humanity and compassion. If that's what raged in his soul ... ! Can you imagine? If that's what raged in my own soul, ... !

I may never learn to reconcile the two Hemingways in my head, so it seems I may be doomed forever like Sisyphus, to keep trying until I reach the top.

I don't know how to stop reading him.

Stories in UpperCase are 10/10. The rest are rated accordingly, along with one anomalous "wth?".


THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER
THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO
OLD MAN AT THE BRIDGE
5/10 Up in Michigan
8/10 On the Quai at Smyrna
8/10 Indian Camp
7.5/10 The Doctor and The Doctor's Wife
7.5/10 The End of Something
7.5/10 The Three Day Blow
THE BATTLER
8/10 A very Short Story
SOLDIER'S HOME
8/10 The Revolutionist
8/10 Mr. and Mrs Elliot
9/10 Cat In The Rain
7.5/10 Out of Season
8/10 Cross-Country Snow
7/10 My Old Man
9/10 Big Two-Hearted River I
9/10 Big Two Hearted River II
THE UNDEFEATED
IN ANOTHER COUNTRY
8/10 Hills Like White Elephants
9/10 The Killers
CHE TI DICE LA PATRIA
5/10 Fifty Grand
A SIMPLE ENQUIRY
8/10 Ten Indians
A CANARY FOR ONE
wth? An Alpine Idyll*
8/10 A Pursuit Race
8/10 Today is Friday
7/10 Banal Story
8/10 Now I Lay Me
9/10 After The Storm
A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE
8/10 The Light of the World
GOD REST YOU MERRY, GENTLEMEN
5/10 The Sea Change
A WAY YOU'LL NEVER BE
8/10 The Mother of a Queen
8/10 One Reader Writes
8/10 Homage to Switzerland
8/10 A Day's Wait
A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD
9/10 Wine of Wyoming
9/10 The Gambler, The Nun and the Radio
FATHERS AND SONS
5/10 One Trip Across
5/10 The Tradesman's Return
7/10 The Denunciation
7/10 The Butterfly and the Tank
NIGHT BEFORE BATTLE
UNDER THE RIDGE
NOBODY EVER DIES
8/10 The Good Lion
8/10 The Faithful Bull
9/10 Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog
8/10 A Man of the World
7/10 Summer People
9/10 The Last Good Country
8/10 An African Story**
7/10 A Train Trip
THE PORTER
8/10 Black Ass at the Cross Roads
8/10 Landscape with Figures
I GUESS EVERYTHING REMINDS YOU OF SOMETHING
8/10 Great News from the Mainland
7/10 The Strange Country

* bizarre, even for Hemingway
**0/10 for content

Read several short stories while climbing Kilimanjaro - will likely not finish the collection.

مقدمه و ترجمه، عالی بود. انتخاب کلمات حرف نداشت.

Note to self : موقع خوندن داستان‌کوتاه، داستان به داستان آپدیت کن و امیتاز بده و نظر بنویس

"فکر کرد، نه، وقتی کاری که آدم انجام می‌دهد زیاد طول بکشد یا بیش از حد تاخیر کند، نباید انتظار داشته باشد که آدم‌ها منتظر بمانند. آدم‌ها همه رفته‌اند. جشن تمام شده و حالا آدم مانده است و میزبان زن." - برف‌های کلیمانجارو

Hemingway is known for his novels, but he is in fact an excellent short story writer, and is probably in fact even better at this form than he is at the novel. Hemingway's tendency towards paucity and short phrases works to his favour in a short form. Stories like "Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," capture a wide sense of atmosphere, while also revealing small tidbits about relatively average people, resulting in an extreme range of insight in a short space. My version of Complete Stories for example has highlights and circles all over the place, around those sentences where Hemingway did amazing things in just a few words, or in a set of dialogue. For anyone who hasn't gotten to Hemingway yet, or has been turned off due to the toxic masculinity of his persona, I'd recommend you turning through the pages of the complete stories, and trying your hardest to find at least one story that doesn't interest you. I think the breadth of topics, range of narratives, and accessibility of Hemingway's style would make it unlikely to be the case.

I took it slowly, reading a few stories in between a novel, to keep this feast forever going. Today I've read the last story of this brilliant collection of a book. And I just realized it has been exactly a year since I opened this gem. And along the way, I've finished 34 books this year, not that numbers matter, but for a novice reader like myself this is impressive.

"It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.
'Will you have a lime juice or lemon squash?' Macomber asked.
'I’ll have a gimlet,' Robert Wilson told him.
'I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,' Macomber’s wife said.
'I suppose it’s the thing to do,' Macomber agreed.

Hemingway accomplishes so much with so little page in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". To say that the opening sentence is captivating, to say that the four short sentences of dialogue immediately following it set the tone and scenario up brilliantly, to say that this same dialogue nails the characters, to say any of this seems a lame injustice to Hemingway and his talent – seems no more effective than to say, “It’s just… I can’t explain… Wow!”
Also noteworthy within this story is Hemingway’s gift for plot, his guts in pushing plot to its limits. But, I wonder: Wouldn’t “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber” be a fine, already emotionally complex story if Margaret did not kiss Wilson passionately in front of her husband immediately following his shameful act of cowardice? If she had only dropped Macomber’s hand, and not leaned in to kiss Wilson, thereby implicating him, wouldn’t the story have held up? Wouldn’t it be a great story without Margaret slipping off to Wilson’s tent in the night? I think it would hold up barring theses incidents.
Some might argue these brazen acts on the part of Margaret go to character, and prepare the reader for the story’s final scene. Some might argue they make her more likeable – in the delicious flavor of a villain. Some might say they make the story better. I agree with all of this, but I also know that were I to have written this story (and I don’t mean to presume I could), I wouldn’t have let her do these things. Yes, I would have had her shoot Macomber in the end, but as for the other things: no. I wouldn’t have had the foresight, or the guts. (And there’s a lesson in this for me that warrants much consideration.)
“Hills Like White Elephants”: Again, the dialogue -- the incredible dialogue -- strikes me, humbles me, makes me want to snap my pen in two. Most brilliant within the dialogue in this story is what is not said, like the whole never-mentioned abortion business. But, what impresses me most is Hemingway’s hand in instructing the reader as to how to read this story.
“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.
“That’s the way with everything.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.”
“Oh, cut it out.”
“You started it,” the girl said….
Up until the man chastises the girl, there is nothing to indicate that she isn’t truly speaking about her drink. This reproach from the man -- the emphatic “Oh”, the clipped words, the familiarity of it, set against the seemingly innocent opinion this girl has regarding the taste of her drink -- serves to alert the reader to the fact that something beyond the obvious is going on. And the girl’s response confirms this.
When she goes on to say, “I was being amused. I was having a fine time… I was trying. I said the mountains looked like what elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” the reader comes to realize that even their earlier conversation meant more than what the words on the page indicated. And in this way, Hemingway has effectively yanked the reader up by the cuff of her collar, as if to say, “Pay attention.” And the remainder of the story is read, considered with the deeper perspective necessary to make it, not just comprehensible, but deeply satisfying.
Where it is the beginning of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that blew me away, it is the ending of “A Simple Enquiry” that resonates with me. Essentially this story is two pages long. The first three paragraphs are long descriptive pieces to set the scene, and to very subtly put the reader’s mind where it needs to be to appreciate the story:
While he worked at the papers he put his fingers of his left hand into a saucer of oil and then spread the oil over his face, touching it very gently with the tips of his fingers. He was very careful to drain his fingers on the edge of the saucer so there was only a film of oil on them, and after he had stroked his forehead and his cheeks, he stroked hs nose very delicately between his fingers.

But again, it is with dialogue (set against the major laying on his bunk and the boy, Pinen, standing beside him), and the perfectly placed pauses between dialogue, that Hemingway turns the tension full throttle, and the reader follows the conversation with bated breath, until she sees Pinen safely dismissed. Whew!
Then the story draws to a close:
The major, lying on his bunk, looking at his cloth-covered helmet and his snow-glasses that hung from a nail on the wall, heard him walk across the floor. The little devil, he thought, I wonder if he lied to me.

And Pinen is in jeopardy once more, and the story isn’t finished, although the reader is dismissed. This is an interesting strategy that would make for a nice experiment for a student of the craft.
There are volumes to be said for Hemingway’s short stories, and even these brief annotations could go on for another hundred pages – I haven’t even mentioned “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. So, I’ll wrap things up now with this: I read “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” half a dozen times just to relive the dialogue between the two waiters because, well… it’s just really… it makes me… uh, …you know it’s just … It’s wonderful, really!

This edition contains the stories that were published in The First Forty-nine (which included the three earlier books, In Our Time, Men Without Women, and Winner Take Nothing, and four other stories including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”) and another 21 stories that were published elsewhere or unpublished. (Since this came out, there have been more complete editions but the additional materials are not very important except for Hemingway specialists.)

The stories are what one would expect from Hemingway, largely concerned with “masculine” activities such as war, smuggling, bullfighting, hunting and fishing. There are a number of “Nick Adams” stories set in Michigan, stories set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, and others set in Spain and Cuba. Despite having been vaccinated against Hemingway in high school, I enjoyed many of these stories; I like Hemingway’s style when it’s by Hemingway, although I dislike most of the writers who imitate it.

مجموعه ی داستان های کوتاهی بود که خیلی دوست داشتم وبیشتر از همه مقدمه‌ی جذابش ✨️

I read this from cover to cover on a beach in Aruba, which was just weird, because somebody dies every ten pages or so. It wasn't really in keeping with the carefree beach vibe we were going for. But you really can't deny Hemingway. I realize the man was a terrible husband and father, that his writing suffered in the end and that he didn't have the most highly evolved views of gender. But despite all that, in his prime, he wrote dozens of truly great stories.

At the small Midwestern evangelical liberal arts college that I attended, there was a lit professor who made the statement that Hemingway couldn't write emotion. We were reading "A Farewell to Arms," and the majority of students in the class (mostly young women who were aspiring elementary school teachers) agreed with her. I spent class after class defending Hemingway to these heartless women, who read "A Farewell to Arms" as some sort of failed romance novel. After reading through his short stories, I haven't changed my opinion. Hemingway writes emotion beautifully. His restraint makes it possible for him to convey the emotions of characters who for one reason or another don't demonstrate their emotions in obvious ways, much like huge segments of the human population. Not everybody breaks down and cries like a girl as soon as something goes wrong. I do, but not everybody.

Took an eternity to read, but worth it.

Amazing: The Battler, Hills Like White Elephants, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hills Like White Elephants.

Hemmingway is a genius writer, maybe the best ever, but I feel like he focused on that too much. To me, his stories feel really interested in their own literary achievement and reputation. Everything I read from Hemmingway is incredibly impressive, but I don’t really enjoy his stuff as much as I enjoy other, less impressive writing. I like the way Steinbeck does things more.

This was my first time reading Ernest Hemingway. This book of short stories has good reviews and I was excited to finally read some of his work. Sadly, I despised it all.

It took me several weeks to get through these, because I found them so dull. The endings to many were very abrupt, and not in a good way. Very little character development for the men, and none at all for women.

I'm disappointed I didn't enjoy this, but now I know, I'm not a Hemmingway fan.