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graciegrace1178's review against another edition
4.0
Do you have writer's block? Do you want to feel really horrible about it? Boy, is this the read for you!!
Maybe if I read this in a different mindset it'll get 5 stars. 4 for now tho. 4.02 ish. Have to turn this over in my mind a little more before I can produce a review. Hm hm hm hm hm.
QUOTES
"But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."
"We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing."
"He had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he
would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched
it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would."
"So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more quarrelling. He could promise that."
"Then he’d started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?"
"I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
'It’s a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long.'"
"'You know the only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity,' he said to her."
Maybe if I read this in a different mindset it'll get 5 stars. 4 for now tho. 4.02 ish. Have to turn this over in my mind a little more before I can produce a review. Hm hm hm hm hm.
QUOTES
"But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."
"We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing."
"He had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he
would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched
it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would."
"So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more quarrelling. He could promise that."
"Then he’d started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?"
"I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
'It’s a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long.'"
"'You know the only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity,' he said to her."
gilad_bd's review against another edition
adventurous
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
ftrebelo's review against another edition
2.0
What an ugly perspective of love and the human condition. I felt a bit nauseous after reading this.
theuncultured's review against another edition
4.0
I kind of wanted to dislike this book because I can't remember the last time I read a collection of short stories and thought to myself, "yeah, that's something I want to do more often!" but what can I say? Hemingway tells a mean 3-pager. These are perfect little stories with interesting characters. Every character seemed to convey what Hemingway was feeling at the time of writing the story; when he hated women, we had 'The End of Something', when he was in search of solitude we had 'Big Two-Hearted River' and when he felt disappointment for not telling a story we had 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', etc. The gist is that this is a great book, especially for those who want to know a little more about Ernest Hemingway.
yars_reading_corner's review against another edition
2.0
My brain kept playing The Lovesick Blues reading this, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone
bruinuclafan's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed most of the stories in this book. This was the firs time I read Hemingway since high school, and man can he write. Maybe a little over the top with the strong alpha male themes, but still great stories. I'd recommend for a quick and varied read.
The Snows of Kilamanjaro - Reminded me of a cross between The Death of Ivan Ilyich and a certain part of War and Peace involving Prince Andrew. Really interesting psychology and ending.
A Clean, Well-lighted Place - I think this one is for an older or mature crowd. Just beautiful and captures a certain spirit or mood that is hard to describe.
A Day's Wait - Cute, very funny (though not for the kid!)
The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio - Odd story. Some interesting commentary.
Fathers and Sons - Another odd one. Some interesting moments but didn't love it.
In Another Country - Exploration of military valor and grief. Short but effective.
The Killers - Intense. Really shows a dark side of Hemingway's mind. I liked this one a lot.
A Way You'll Never Be - Another military story. Didn't love it. Too hard to follow.
Fifty Grand - This is a great story! About a boxer near the end of his career preparing for a title fight.
The Short happy Life of Francis Macomber - Another great story! This could have been a novella even. Intense exploration of manhood as seen through the lens of an unhappily married couple.
The Snows of Kilamanjaro - Reminded me of a cross between The Death of Ivan Ilyich and a certain part of War and Peace involving Prince Andrew. Really interesting psychology and ending.
A Clean, Well-lighted Place - I think this one is for an older or mature crowd. Just beautiful and captures a certain spirit or mood that is hard to describe.
A Day's Wait - Cute, very funny (though not for the kid!)
The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio - Odd story. Some interesting commentary.
Fathers and Sons - Another odd one. Some interesting moments but didn't love it.
In Another Country - Exploration of military valor and grief. Short but effective.
The Killers - Intense. Really shows a dark side of Hemingway's mind. I liked this one a lot.
A Way You'll Never Be - Another military story. Didn't love it. Too hard to follow.
Fifty Grand - This is a great story! About a boxer near the end of his career preparing for a title fight.
The Short happy Life of Francis Macomber - Another great story! This could have been a novella even. Intense exploration of manhood as seen through the lens of an unhappily married couple.
doctorwithoutboundaries's review against another edition
4.0
Read me now; quote me later: Fifty years from now, Hemingway will be universally reviled, if he’s not already irrelevant... How do I know this? I don’t. But since I write these reviews primarily for myself, I feel no guilt in making a bold declaration, backed up with nothing but intuition. We live in politically conscious times, and our cultural values are changing too quickly, moving away from the gendered worldview of Hem and his ilk. Unless this worrying trend of banning books based on microaggressions—rather than debating them—collapses upon itself, we will soon cease to tolerate anything but the disavowal of Hemingway; not even curiosity will merit forgiveness.
For my part, I’m glad I read this book before such a time. Not all of these stories impressed me, but the ones that did offered so much to chew that I could overlook the binarism of the easily discernible authorial voice. Under the reader’s glare, Hem’s iceberg-like narration melts to create tiny rivulets of varying shades, and steady undercurrents are discovered all around it. Although I love a packed sentence as much as the next person, Hem’s clipped prose proves no less heavy with emotion. Short and direct though his constructions may be, they are rarely empty. Whatever else you may think of Papa, you can’t deny that the man had style... There’s an odd appeal to writing so restrained that it seems as if it might have caused the author physical pain.
After some time in Hem’s company, however, the reader begins to feel the dull throbbing of monotony; you start to adopt the uninterested manner of his protagonists and find it increasingly difficult to invest in the outcomes awaiting them. That’s why I found these ten short stories much more palatable than the three novels by him that I’ve read. Such morsels allow the reader to notice the fundamental interconnections in the book—similarities that, pieced together, form the path to understanding the writer. While his plots are baffling at times, Hem is, as ever, utterly transparent.
The first five stories are my favourites in the collection. Lucidly told yet rich with visual details, they employ simple words to convey profound insights on human nature and a multitude of other themes. Occasionally moralising but never dull, even playful, these five stories transcend the views they uphold and the lost ideals for which they hanker. The first of them is The Snows of Kilimanjaro, undoubtedly the strongest tale, offering huge rewards to those who seek to learn from it. Harry, an erstwhile writer, recalls all the words he never put to paper, now, at the hour of his death. Suffering from gangrene, yet asphyxiated by regret, Harry’s hallucinations and eloquent reminiscences are intermingled with evocative descriptions of Africa.
But Papa doesn’t let the reader luxuriate for too long in the radiant snow; he follows it quickly with yet another tale that dispels darkness, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. In their later years, two of the men in this story are disillusioned; none of it means anything at all, they know. How, then, must we live out our days? By instilling them with some semblance of order, by creating our own nirvana... These men are contrasted against the young, who hold different perceptions and award meaning to the transient. How soon the old forget the days of their youth, much like the father in A Day’s Wait. Lost in a vividly described pursuit of quarry, he returns from his hunt to find that his nine year-old son, Schatz, is convinced he’s dying. In a bid to assuage his fears, he dismisses them entirely. Do we ever recover from such rude shocks?
Perhaps not, and that might explain why everyone on this good earth is intoxicating themselves with their preferred brand of poison. Things that once nurtured and sheltered now enable the masses to escape loneliness and ignore reality. Alcohol, religion, even music... all poured into the void that cannot be filled by the characters in The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio. Fathers and Sons alike are possessed by the need to fill this indeterminate emptiness, driven to extreme ends if they fail, yet forever divided by the havoc of time and the inexpressible differences that it births. Nick Adams’ recollections of his childhood—autobiographical, in some measure—appear like snapshots taken from the window of a speeding car, abundant and incomplete all at once.
Our march is halted In Another Country, dragging the book down towards the overtly didactic tone that it had so far avoided. Masculinity is as good as a character within it, a mentality defined by rigid terms, trapping men behind bars, punishing them at the slightest display of weakness. This cage only becomes smaller in The Killers, where hopelessness and surrender are vilified as weakness and passivity. Nick Adams encounters the eponymous would-be murderers, who are almost vaudevillian in appearance, at a diner. The scene that follows belongs in a silent film, wherein the details are sharp and the mood is consistent. But sadly, the morals are laid on rather thick, resulting in a meagre payoff.
We meet Nick again in a vastly different time and place, in a more critical state of health. As his mind reels with PTSD amidst the horrors of World War I, Hem breaks habit to narrate his delusions in a stream-of-consciousness mode... A Way You’ll Never Be is Papa’s avenue of approaching his own experiences in the war; exploring comradeship between soldiers and delivering impressionistic descriptions, it gets the book back on its feet. Fifty Grand lends a helping hand as well, by orienting the lens on a boxer who’s forced to face the loss of his identity. As his body ages, rendering him weaker by the day, he must reinvent himself and find new methods to survive. It’s a tale of desperation, silence, thoughtfulness, and the ineluctable force of time.
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber was a desperate existence, too, shamed at every turn by a wife he was anxious to please. Here, a murky narrator dynamically describes an African hunt but, again, Hem’s irksome views take centre-stage, more vitriolic than ever before. He casts the woman as symbolic of all evil, even as she is a mere mouthpiece for his own philosophy. Hem’s belief that fear of any sort is inexcusable and must be overcome becomes the goal of Macomber’s brief time on earth. This account of how he overpowers cowardice is rooted in hyper-masculinity, focused on the dance between manliness and emasculation—concepts for which I have little tolerance. But, in retrospect, it does seem as if Hem was intensely aware of the unfair cost of such shows of strength as are expected of men.
Will we still be reading Hemingway aeons from now? It seems unlikely that future generations will accept the demands that he makes of men in his stories. It seems impossible that decades from today anyone could espouse the disdain that he had for women, who are portrayed as either non-entities or loathsome obstacles to the men in their lives. Until then, however, I intend to keep reading him. I don’t embrace his ideology, but he was a master of subtext and I aim to be his humble student. Hem’s narrative voice is intransigent, yet here he covers diverse themes, spans different continents, and incorporates manifold motifs. His spare yet palpable writing is an important contribution to the art of storytelling; its influence on modern writers is undeniable, and I am reminded most keenly of Salter’s ‘Last Night’... It’s been a year of great short stories.
TL;DR
The Snows of Kilimanjaro - 5/5
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - 5/5
A Day’s Wait - 5/5
The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio - 5/5
Fathers and Sons - 5/5
In Another Country - 3.5/5
The Killers - 3/5
A Way You’ll Never Be - 3.5/5
Fifty Grand - 5/5
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - 3.75/5
For my part, I’m glad I read this book before such a time. Not all of these stories impressed me, but the ones that did offered so much to chew that I could overlook the binarism of the easily discernible authorial voice. Under the reader’s glare, Hem’s iceberg-like narration melts to create tiny rivulets of varying shades, and steady undercurrents are discovered all around it. Although I love a packed sentence as much as the next person, Hem’s clipped prose proves no less heavy with emotion. Short and direct though his constructions may be, they are rarely empty. Whatever else you may think of Papa, you can’t deny that the man had style... There’s an odd appeal to writing so restrained that it seems as if it might have caused the author physical pain.
After some time in Hem’s company, however, the reader begins to feel the dull throbbing of monotony; you start to adopt the uninterested manner of his protagonists and find it increasingly difficult to invest in the outcomes awaiting them. That’s why I found these ten short stories much more palatable than the three novels by him that I’ve read. Such morsels allow the reader to notice the fundamental interconnections in the book—similarities that, pieced together, form the path to understanding the writer. While his plots are baffling at times, Hem is, as ever, utterly transparent.
The first five stories are my favourites in the collection. Lucidly told yet rich with visual details, they employ simple words to convey profound insights on human nature and a multitude of other themes. Occasionally moralising but never dull, even playful, these five stories transcend the views they uphold and the lost ideals for which they hanker. The first of them is The Snows of Kilimanjaro, undoubtedly the strongest tale, offering huge rewards to those who seek to learn from it. Harry, an erstwhile writer, recalls all the words he never put to paper, now, at the hour of his death. Suffering from gangrene, yet asphyxiated by regret, Harry’s hallucinations and eloquent reminiscences are intermingled with evocative descriptions of Africa.
But Papa doesn’t let the reader luxuriate for too long in the radiant snow; he follows it quickly with yet another tale that dispels darkness, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. In their later years, two of the men in this story are disillusioned; none of it means anything at all, they know. How, then, must we live out our days? By instilling them with some semblance of order, by creating our own nirvana... These men are contrasted against the young, who hold different perceptions and award meaning to the transient. How soon the old forget the days of their youth, much like the father in A Day’s Wait. Lost in a vividly described pursuit of quarry, he returns from his hunt to find that his nine year-old son, Schatz, is convinced he’s dying. In a bid to assuage his fears, he dismisses them entirely. Do we ever recover from such rude shocks?
Perhaps not, and that might explain why everyone on this good earth is intoxicating themselves with their preferred brand of poison. Things that once nurtured and sheltered now enable the masses to escape loneliness and ignore reality. Alcohol, religion, even music... all poured into the void that cannot be filled by the characters in The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio. Fathers and Sons alike are possessed by the need to fill this indeterminate emptiness, driven to extreme ends if they fail, yet forever divided by the havoc of time and the inexpressible differences that it births. Nick Adams’ recollections of his childhood—autobiographical, in some measure—appear like snapshots taken from the window of a speeding car, abundant and incomplete all at once.
Our march is halted In Another Country, dragging the book down towards the overtly didactic tone that it had so far avoided. Masculinity is as good as a character within it, a mentality defined by rigid terms, trapping men behind bars, punishing them at the slightest display of weakness. This cage only becomes smaller in The Killers, where hopelessness and surrender are vilified as weakness and passivity. Nick Adams encounters the eponymous would-be murderers, who are almost vaudevillian in appearance, at a diner. The scene that follows belongs in a silent film, wherein the details are sharp and the mood is consistent. But sadly, the morals are laid on rather thick, resulting in a meagre payoff.
We meet Nick again in a vastly different time and place, in a more critical state of health. As his mind reels with PTSD amidst the horrors of World War I, Hem breaks habit to narrate his delusions in a stream-of-consciousness mode... A Way You’ll Never Be is Papa’s avenue of approaching his own experiences in the war; exploring comradeship between soldiers and delivering impressionistic descriptions, it gets the book back on its feet. Fifty Grand lends a helping hand as well, by orienting the lens on a boxer who’s forced to face the loss of his identity. As his body ages, rendering him weaker by the day, he must reinvent himself and find new methods to survive. It’s a tale of desperation, silence, thoughtfulness, and the ineluctable force of time.
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber was a desperate existence, too, shamed at every turn by a wife he was anxious to please. Here, a murky narrator dynamically describes an African hunt but, again, Hem’s irksome views take centre-stage, more vitriolic than ever before. He casts the woman as symbolic of all evil, even as she is a mere mouthpiece for his own philosophy. Hem’s belief that fear of any sort is inexcusable and must be overcome becomes the goal of Macomber’s brief time on earth. This account of how he overpowers cowardice is rooted in hyper-masculinity, focused on the dance between manliness and emasculation—concepts for which I have little tolerance. But, in retrospect, it does seem as if Hem was intensely aware of the unfair cost of such shows of strength as are expected of men.
Will we still be reading Hemingway aeons from now? It seems unlikely that future generations will accept the demands that he makes of men in his stories. It seems impossible that decades from today anyone could espouse the disdain that he had for women, who are portrayed as either non-entities or loathsome obstacles to the men in their lives. Until then, however, I intend to keep reading him. I don’t embrace his ideology, but he was a master of subtext and I aim to be his humble student. Hem’s narrative voice is intransigent, yet here he covers diverse themes, spans different continents, and incorporates manifold motifs. His spare yet palpable writing is an important contribution to the art of storytelling; its influence on modern writers is undeniable, and I am reminded most keenly of Salter’s ‘Last Night’... It’s been a year of great short stories.
TL;DR
The Snows of Kilimanjaro - 5/5
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - 5/5
A Day’s Wait - 5/5
The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio - 5/5
Fathers and Sons - 5/5
In Another Country - 3.5/5
The Killers - 3/5
A Way You’ll Never Be - 3.5/5
Fifty Grand - 5/5
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - 3.75/5
trigout's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
openallnight_'s review against another edition
3.0
“I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
'It's a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long.”
'It's a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long.”