High T, low PC.

Many moons ago, 60 years in fact, in a high school English class, my essay was chosen as an example of an exemplary execution of an assignment - had not happened before or since. The teacher had given us a list of a dozen famous authors and asked us to pick one and emulate their style in a very short story and I chose Hemingway. I wove a tale of a hunter pausing in the woods for a smoke at the side of a large boulder, under a canopy of broadleaf forest. I felt the topic fit well with Hemingway's ability to describe natural settings in a straightforward, terse but complete manner. (Faulkner once said "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." To which Hemingway noted "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?") Such sums up Hemingway's style, spare but powerful. So wandering through Hemingway's home in Key West, I came across this collection and realized it had been a long time since I had read him so picked up a copy.

Like most collections of this type, the tales are uneven. Terrific 'luster nuggets" and a few bombs but the thread ( and I make no claim that I have solved the issue of how to evaluate historical figures in light of their times versus ours), but the stories tend to be "high Testosterone" favoring what some now call toxic masculinity with an emphasis on physical courage, manly sports like big game hunting, bull fighting, war, etc. Set in a milieu of low PC or political correctness. He shows respect for a black individual by at least capitalizing the "N" word but uses lower case when referring to a group. Women tend to be trophies, subject to some degree of abuse but there is a strong one or two scattered about.

Still, enough to remind one of why he is considered one of America's best writers (winning the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for "The Old Man and the Sea" in 1953 and 54. Many flashes of brilliance in these stories and scenes to make you glad we are moving on. Also includes some previously unpublished work as a bit of an extra.

I DID IT IREAD THEM ALL

Three-and-a-half pages. The husband, the wife, the owner of the hotel they're staying. And the cat in the rain. From these, Hemingway tells the universal story of husbands who find their wives tiresome, unimportant and not worth listening to. Lots of them here at goodreads, for sure.

I have read most if not all of the individual collections so this is largely a re-read that picks up any stray stories that I missed.

n  One time there was a bull and his name was not Ferdinand and he cared nothing for flowers.n

Hemingway’s reputation precedes him: a misogynistic, alcoholic, macho author whose maximum sentence length was five words. Given all this, it is difficult to understand why feminist, vegetarian, and highbrow folks often end up reading and enjoying his work—as I’ve seen happen. Clearly there is more to Hemingway than his myth; but separating the man from his reputation is especially difficult in his case, since the myth, however simplifying, has a substantial grain of truth.
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The best place to begin this disentanglement may be his short stories. Hemingway was an excellent writer of short stories, perhaps even better than he was a novelist, and these stories display his qualities in concentrated form. More than that, the succession of tales allows the reader to see Hemingway in all his favorite attitudes, which makes this an ideal place for the critic to set to work.
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The most conspicuous aspect of Hemingway’s writing is his style. He was, above all, a stylist; and his prose has probably been the most influential of the previous century. He uses simple words and avoids grammatical subordination; instead of commas, parentheses, or semicolons he simply uses the word “and.” The final affect is staccato, lean, and blunt: the sentences tumble forward in a series of broken images, accumulating into a disjointed pile. The tone is deadpan: neither rising to a crescendo nor ascending into lyricism. One imagines most lines read by someone who has been hypnotized, in a subdued monotone.
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On the level of story and structure, too, Hemingway is a stylist. He developed characteristic ways of omitting material and splicing scenes to disorient the reader. Between two lines of conversation, for example, many minutes may have elapsed. Characters typically talk around the issue, only eluding vaguely to the principle event that determined the story, thus leaving readers to grasp at straws. The most famous example of this may be “Hills Like White Elephants,” a sparse conversation between a couple in which they make (or don't) a decision to do something (or other).
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Hemingway’s most typical plot strategy is to fill a story with atmospheric descriptions and seemingly pointless conversations until everything suddenly explodes right before the end. My favorite example of this is “The Capital of the World,” which is hardly a story at all until the final moments. His protagonists (who are, to my knowledge, exclusively male) are most often harboring some traumatic memory and find themselves drifting towards the next traumatic event that ends the narrative. The uncomfortable darkness surrounding their past creates an anxious sense of foreboding about their future (which the events usually justify)—and this is how Hemingway keeps up the tension that gets readers to the end.
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Hemingway is certainly not a writer of characters. An experiment will make this very clear. Read the dialogue of any of his protagonists out loud, and even Hemingway fans will have difficulty saying who is doing the talking. In short, all of his protagonists sound the same—like Hemingway himself. You might say that Hemingway had one big character with many different manifestations. Luckily this character is compelling—damaged but tough, proud but sensitive, capable of both callousness and tenderness—and, most important, highly original. A much underappreciated aspect of this character, by the way, is the humor. Hemingway had a dry and occasionally absurdist comedic sense, which can be seen most clearly in this collection in “The Good Lion” (a story about a lion who only eats Italian food).
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His stories circle tightly around the same subjects: war, boxing, bullfighting, fishing, hunting, and desperate love affairs—with alcohol ever-present. Without doubt Hemingway was attracted to violence. But he is not a Tarantino, an aficionado of the aesthetics of violence. Rather, violence for Hemingway is not beautiful in itself but a kind of necessary crucible to reduce life to its barest elements. For with life, like prose, Hemingway was a minimalist and a purist. And the essential question of life, for him, was what a man did when faced with an overpowering force—whether this came in the form of a bull, a marlin, a war, or nature itself. And the typical Hemingway response to this conundrum is to go down swinging with a kind of grim resolve, even if you’d rather just not bother with the whole ordeal.
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Nature plays an interesting double role in Hemingway’s fiction: as adversary and comforter. Sometimes characters escape into nature, like Nick Adams going fishing. Other times they must face it down, like Francis Macomber with his buffalo. Yet nature is never to be passively enjoyed, as a bird watcher or a naturalist, but must always be engaged with—as either predator or prey. Of course you always end up as the prey in the end; that’s not the question. The question is whether these roles are performed with dignity—bravery, resolve, skill—or without. Writing itself, for him, is a kind of hunting, a hunting inside of yourself for the cold truth, and must also be done bravely or the writer will end up producing rubbish. And even the writer ends up prey in the end—eaten by his own demons.
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This, as far as I can tell, is Hemingway’s insistent theme—the central thread that ties his other interests together. And one's final reaction to his work will thus rest on the extent to which one thinks that this view encapsulates reality. For me, and I believe for many readers, Hemingway at his best does capture an essential part of life, one that is usually missed or ignored. But such a universally cannibalistic world is difficult to stomach in large doses.
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Even within the boundaries of his own style, Hemingway has some notable defects. He most often gets into trouble nowadays for his portrayal of women. And it is true that none of them, to my memory, are three-dimensional. What most puts me off is the cloyingly subordinate way that many of the women speak to their partners. But what I found even more uncomfortable was Hemingway’s racist treatment of black characters, which was hard to take at times. And as I mentioned in another review, I can also do with fewer mentions of food and drink.
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These criticisms are just small sample of what can be lodged at him. Yet even the harshest critic, if they are a sensitive reader, must admit that he is a writer who cuts deeply. When Hemingway’s story and his style hit their stride, the effect is powerful and unforgettable. My personal favorite is the paragraphs in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” when the narration switches to the lion’s point of view:

Macomber stepped out of the curved opening at the side of the front seat, onto the step and down onto the ground. The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some super-rhino. There was no man smell carried toward him and he watched the object, moving his great head a little from side to side. Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down the bank to drink with such a thing opposite him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it and he turned his heavy head and swung away toward the cover of the trees as he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach.

It is hard to overstate how absolutely wonderful and powerful a writer of short stories that Hemingway was. This collection contains so many wonderful sketches full of spit, vinegar, blood, and whiskey stains. Through them we experience attempted murder on a train, the Spanish Civil War in Madrid, the First and Second World Wars in Italy and France respectively, fishing, hunting, fucking, and drinking. The prose is always terse but incredibly saturated in description and meaning. Who else could describe sex thus:

“In the dark he went into the strange country and it was very strange indeed, hard to enter, suddenly perilously difficult, then blindingly, happily, safely, encompassed; free of all doubts, all perils and all dreads, held unholdingly, to hold, to hold increasingly, unholdingly still to hold, taking away all things before, and all to come, bringing the beginning of bright happiness in darkness, closer, closer, closer now closer and ever closer, to go on past all belief, longer, finer, further, finer higher and higher to drive towards happiness suddenly, scaldingly achieved.” (p. 615)

I am reading Meyers' masterful biography Hemingway: A Biography and it is fascinating to see how each of these stories encapsulates a piece of Hemingway's personal experience. His life was particularly exciting and turbulent: WWI ambulance driver (where he met John Dos Passos), Parisian journalist, Parisian bohemian writer, Spanish Civil War participant, bull-fighting aficionado, big game hunter, sport fisherman, and inveterate ladies' man, these stories all pull from his catalog of sensations and memories. It is important to note going in that in his writing technique, Hemingway felt that it was equally important to leave out some information so that the reader has to fill in the blanks. He thought of stories as icebergs with 90% of the content left unsaid. This leaves a considerable amount of ambiguity to many of the stories because no moral conclusion is drawn; his goal is to dive as deep into the experience itself so that the reader feels personally involved in the story.

If you have never read Hemingway, it is possible to start here before heading on San Fermin to Basque Country where The Sun Also Rises. But if you have read his novels, please don’t miss the opportunity to revel on his stupendous writing. He might be the US’ all-time greatest writer of short stories. They are nothing less than marvelous.

Don't miss my review of the Meyer biography of Hemingway: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

My opinions on books (as well as everyone else's) are always much more complicated than a simple star rating, yet despite that fact I never write any reviews. This time, however, I really feel the need to write an explanation for my rating and describe my true feelings on Hemingway's Complete Short Stories. I would say a major reason for this is because this book was given to my dad by one of his friends more than eight years ago when my dad was sick, as something to read while on his deathbed; he never finished it, so I took it, thus this book has great sentimental value for me. It is also my second attempt at reading it. I started it about four years ago, got a hundred or so pages into it, and never went back, so I started it over again about a month and a half ago, and finally finished it today.

I struggled to decide between giving this collection three or four stars, but eventually I gave it three because my dominant feeling as I was reading it was that I was just trying to plow through it to finish it. I didn't particularly dislike any of the stories, but most of them to me were just "fine," and not very interesting. However, several stories stood out above the rest. My two favorites, which I would give five stars, were "Cat in the Rain" and "A Natural History of the Dead." Others I particularly liked that would get four stars were "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Old Man at the Bridge," "Hills Like White Elephants," "Che Ti Dice La Patria?," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," "Homage to Switzerland," and "I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something." I also like all of the Nick Adams stories, mostly because I'm from Northern Michigan and most of them take place there, but also because they're coming of age stories that stand out among Hemingway's others.

Perhaps most importantly, this collection gave me a greater appreciation of Hemingway. Previously I had only read The Old Man and the Sea, which I did not like at all. Reading this collection, I realized that I actually really like Hemingway's writing style, and I disagree with what some people say about his being overtly masculine and glorifying things like war, bull fighting, and big game hunting. He does write about these subjects quite a bit, but he always uses a straightforward, honest, and melancholy tone in his writing, and on top of that those stories are never happy. I would argue that, instead of glorifying these activities, Hemingway depicts what is flawed and sad about participating in them. Particularly in the story "The Capital of the World," he (spoiler alert) shows the dangers of bullfighting, and how one boy's glorification of the sport leads to his untimely, lonely death. And of course, Hemingway had experienced war firsthand and was sent home after being wounded; his war stories are merely an honest interpretation of war from his own personal experiences, and I did not sense anything glorifying about them, just pure honesty.

Although reading through Hemingway's short stories felt tedious at times, I'm glad I finally finished it and I now look forward to reading more of Hemingway's novels in the future. Hopefully I'll enjoy them more than I did The Old Man and the Sea.

decent overall. some of the short stories are standouts (namely Hills like White Elephants). Hemingway is a master at writing subtext in a way where the reader "just gets it" without realizing they are figuring everything out. He is also fantastic at writing about travel locations; if you want to feel like you are traveling, Hemingway is the best author to read.

That being said, some of his protagonists are pretty similar to each other and obvious self stand ins. He loves to write stoic aloof male protagonists with women who seem head over heels in love with them which really isn't compelling when it goes nowhere; and the relationship never goes anywhere except where the male protagonist wants to go

Miljøvennlig globetrotting

مقدمه‌ي داستان گونه‌ي احمد گلشيري درباره‌ي زندگي همينگوي، خود به تنهايي مي توانست يك كتاب مستقل باشد. از طرفي، شناختي از زندگي همينگوي بدست مي‌دهد كه درك داستان‌هاي كوتاهش را ساده‌ و در عين حال عميق‌تر مي‌كند. چرا كه نويسنده ناخودآگاه خودش را مي‌نويسد.

I began this book several years ago and chipped away at it while between novels and deciding what to read next. It's refreshing to know that he can write a bad story. There are a few in here. It was also surprising that he wrote what today is dismissively called "flash fiction." Having all of the stories compiled in the same place, especially the lesser known ones, helps his objects become more clear, the things he returns to over and over again. It's unavoidable for an artist, isn't it? I prefer the flawed version of the author this book presented rather than the mythology that is force-fed to the crowd.

42 SHORT STORIES IN 42 DAYS*

DAY 37: Hills Like White Elephants
Ok, I'll grudgingly admit that this Hemingway guy had something...

*The rules:
– Read one short story a day, every day for six weeks
– Read no more than one story by the same author within any 14-day period
– Deliberately include authors I wouldn't usually read
– Review each story in one sentence or less