Perhaps this is heresy but... I just don't find Hemingway's work to be all that interesting. It just seems like macho tough guy bullshit and maybe-just-maybe there is something humanized and vulnerable deep down in there but I'm not so sure.

Were we talking about mortality?

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Alternatively:



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UPDATE (like… 9 years later): Then I actually read n  Old Man and the Sean, which was pretty good and has some great stuff in it. Anyway there's that.

I had already heard about The Snow…, but as surprising as it may seem, I had no idea of the content of this short story; which is very annoying, because as the story, the time, the characters and the subject of this story are revealed few pages after the beginning, we don’t know who the characters are, or when the story happens. In my humble opinion, before reading a book, you don’t have to know the author, the story he tells, the dates, places, why and how. And in this short story, if we do not know anything about all this before opening the book, we are very annoyed! And personally, I do not like that.
In short, before I understood the problem of the main character, Harry, I hated him. He suffers, alright. He has little hope of recovery, alright. That makes him irritable, I can understand, because I have physical and permanent pains that will never pass and I know that it can make irritable ... if we don’t control ourselves! Harry’s not a child anymore, is he! Biting people who love you and would do everything they could to help you is not excusable.
This being said, I kept on reading, after all, an unsympathetic main character, this can be interesting or entertaining or whatever. While waiting for help to arrive, Harry remembers some parts of his life.
The first memory sets in Karagatch. Do you know where Karagatch is? Well, I'll tell you, it's a village in the North Caucasus, in Russia. I didn’t know where it was, I looked for, so you won’t have to do it, if you have not read The Snows of Kilimanjaro yet.
Oh! And I’m going to tell you where is Schrunz or Schruns: it’s in Austria. But as I don’t ski in Austria or elsewhere, I didn’t know it either!
Oh, and a weinstube is a restaurant-wine bar… if you don’t speak German!
Anyway, next! We’re told about a group of young secretaries who are going to die in the snow; obviously, an old man has knowingly sent them. Obviously, this is happening in Bulgaria, but I had neither the courage nor the desire to search for the historical truth of this fact to know what it was about.
A certain Herr Lent, who owns a mountain, a ski resort, a capital, loses all while playing cards with Harry our "hero". Why? What is the interest of this anecdote?
And Hemingway writes that Harry had never written a line on it and it was too late. Dare I say that perhaps Hemingway should not have written these memories either? These memories that his alcoholic, brawler, quarrelsome, unfair hero, who’s envious of the rich people but who marries only rich women and despises them, a hero too lazy to write all this when he could have done it, did not write either?
And Harry continues to be unpleasant towards his wife, and his memories continue to wander, confused. Maybe they are confused to show us that Harry is delirious? But I didn’t understand the interest of his memories.
Then it would seem that Hemingway practices the litotes: a figure of rhetoric and attenuation, which is to say less, to make one hear more. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the author says less, for sure. But I should have had to open my ears to hear more, maybe?
In addition, there are sometimes weird phrases like: "He knew his neighbors in this neighborhood, because they were poor." ? Does this mean that when you’re rich you can’t know your neighbors? And when you are from the middle class? Do you know only some of your neighbors?
The only thing that pleased me in this short story is what Marie says. She’s a a housekeeper, and full of common sense: "When you have a husband who works until six o'clock, he gets drunk only a little while coming home, and he doesn’t waste too much. When he works till five o’clock, he's drunk every night and leaves you without money. It’s the wife of the worker who suffers from this reduction of working time. "
I will have to read other Hemingway books to reconcile myself with his writings.

My first encounter with this great writer.

I like the majority of the stories here. The first one the most, that gave the name of the volume, a well made drama, also the last one, The Short And Happy Life Of Francis Macomber, a funny tale, in wich I was curios how will it end it, and I`m glad that I wasn`t dissapointed by the very good and unexpected choice, indeed.

Solid stuff!

Viele, tolle Kurzgeschichten. Große Empfehlung für alle die Hemingway mal ausprobieren möchten :)

Foi a primeira vez que li Hemingway e, por isso, este livro foi uma espécie de introdução à sua escrita e temática. Senti ao longo da leitura que uma grande e bela amizade se estava a formar entre nós e, curiosamente senti um pouco de Bukowski nestes seus pequenos contos (depois mais tarde, vim a descobrir que Hemingway foi uma grande influência para Charles Bukowski).

Um livro composto por pequenos contos onde a escrita de Hemingway se consolida à medida que avançamos na leitura. Fiquei curiosa por ler mais deste autor, convencida que este não é o seu melhor trabalho (o conto que dá o nome ao livro e "A Capital do Mundo" - "The Capital of the World" - foram para mim os melhores deste livro!). Mais que isso, achei que esta tradução falhou em transmitir uma certa crueza e pujança que Hemingway possui (e, por isso, lerei na próxima vez em inglês).

De resto, é um livro que explora temas mesmo ao meu gosto: a fragilidade humana, a cobardia, a morte, a redescoberta do amor e a redescoberta de nós próprios.

The Greatest 25 Short Stories of All Time According to Forbes - #17: https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertai...

Ernest Hemingway writes. Beautifully. But it seems his writings are always autobiographical. They are always about death, and It seems like he or someone else is always killing something or destroying relationships. In the end he even destroyed himself. It's the bullfights and the safaris. It's always the same.

This story is about a man and his woman who are waiting at the airport for a plane to come and take him to the hospital. His knee is wounded and he believes that he is dying. As they sit there talking with each other, He begins to verbally abuses wife or girlfriend, Telling her that he does not love her, that she is a rich bitch,... He even tells her that he is with her only because of her money.

I read some books by Ernest Hemingway in my youth, But now it is too difficult to read him. It just isn't worth it to me.

تلاطم های روحی و ذهنی در زندگی برای یک‌نویسنده همچو بادی است که در یک دریاچه ارام قایق خلق اثرشان را به پیش می برد..همینگوی شاید سر راست ترین مصداق ان باشد..نویسنده ای که هر چه‌نوشته از زندگی خود و هر محیطی را که خلق کرده از مشاهدات خود گرفته..فضای جنگ زده و‌پرتلاطم و‌کشمکش اثارهمینگوی همه آینه ذهن او هستند..دریاچه ای ساده و ناارام که البته اصلا مورد علاقه من نیست.
برف های کلیمانجارو شامل داستان هایی ضعیف و سطحی ست اغلب در حد فیلم های‌ هالیوودی..(سطح پایین ترینشان قطعا)
استفاده مکرر همینگوی از یک دختر زیبای عرب یا اسپانیایی..که ناگزیر به عشق یا سکس با کاراکتر اول داستان(تمثال خود همینگوی) است و بعد هم پایان هولناک (چراکه خواننده هایش خشونت و سکس می خواهند،نه پایان شاد)برای یکی از طرفین(غالبا همان دختر،تا که هم احساسات سرکوب شده خواننده برانگیخته شود هم به هر حال اسیب چندانی به خود همینگوی در جایگاه رفیع و پیروز نقش اول مرد داستان هایش نرسد) این طرح تقریبا تمام این داستان هاست..افتضاح...
۸ داستان که کاملا کپی یکدیگر بر طبق این الگو نوشته شده اند..خواندنش تجربه ای تاسف بار بود

I read this twice in succession and I still can't work out why it's so absorbing - is it because of the flashbacks to the times that Harry has survived because he knows he's going to die this time? It's a mystery to me. I don't like the way Harry treats Helen or indeed talks to her, but if you know you're going to pass away, perhaps that skews your judgement or you feel resentful that someone will survive you? I can't know the answer to that. The plane flight at the end of the book over Kilimanjaro is beautifully done.

4.5
...just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a semi-autobiographical story about a dying man, his reminiscences, his thoughts about life and death and his dreams and regrets.

Snows is one of Hem’s finest stories and well worthy of your time. It is a classic of survival, of beauty and of loss.

“And just then it occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden, evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it.”

Do you have bad luck with all games?
With everything and with women. He smiled again, showng his bad teeth.
Truly? -Truly
And what is there to do?
-Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change.”