Customer Reviews

The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The content is excellent. Really, it's a wonderful collection of stories to have. The formatting, however, is quite poor. I would guess that the font size is no larger than 8 or 9. It is also single spaced. I have good vision, but long periods of time reading this book strain my eyes. It's just not as pleasurable as it should be, which is a shame. Unfortunately, it appears that Scribner have the rights to all of Hemingway's works. From my experience, their quality standards are not high.

Review for ISBN: 0684843323

Hemingway's greatest format was always the short story. With the exception (at least in my mind) of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls (The Old Man And the Sea, although great is overrated at the same time), the tension and economy of line required of the short story form became muddled as Hem tackled the novel.

Although this collection is not complete- missing here are two of my favorite Nick Adams stories- it definately contains Hemingway's finest work. My personal favorite, amoung many many choices included here is both parts of "Big Two Hearted River". Although I am not a fly fisherman, I am a human being and Nick's sense of loss and reflection as it becomes manifested in the wilderness resounds beautifully.

Hemingway is often Thoreau with out the self consciousness.

In re-reading these stories it continued to amaze me how utterly accessible and entertaining Hemingway's short stories remain to this day and how utterly dry, academic and pretentious all the "scholarship" has tried to make him in the unsufferable Lit classes I have often endured.

Hemingway is a great story teller who relates simple narratives that sensually create a spiritual experience. His line of action is clear and devoid of any digression. His avoidance of psycho-babble (thank God he didn't live long enough to experience the 1970's!) and his desire to place things grounded in the reality of doing (actors can learn volumes from reading Hemingway) makes him truly timeless.

There are many great writers who write as if they were talking directly to the audience in a barroom or fireside chat. What I find interesting about Hemingway is a strange void of "talkiness". I never get the sense that he could easily be telling me this story as a dramatic monolouge. His style often manages to transcend spoken language and commune directly with the readers's experience through the written word. In that sense, he is a true author using the written word as a full tool.

I discovered this while trying to adapt some of his short stories into a dramatic monolouge/performance pieces. Hemingway doesn't work as well as Faulkner, Steinbeck, Twain, Dylan Thomas or even Ken Kesey. There isn't an oral tradition stored up waiting to be unlocked in Hemingway's work. They are short stories not tall tales (deconstructionist/feminist/new age/PC/Multi-culti critics leave that last claim alone!)

Maybe that is why Hemingway hasn't really ever been successfully translated to the screen.

At any rate, these collected stories are not meant to be seen or heard, they are must reads. Enjoy and re-discover.

A must for any fan of short prose fiction. At times sparse, at times sprawling, Hemingway was one of the best all-time writers. He could convey such deep emotions without the use of many adjectives or adverbs. It didn't matter to him. His at times laconic style spoke more in ten words than most writers could say in 100.

A MUST!

The Complete Short Stories is a wonderful read. It has the fullest collection of Hemingway's short prose available. However I dispute the validity of some of the publisher's selections - which, it turns out, is what this book really is. "One Trip Across" and "The Tradesman's Return" are interesting but are actually part of To Have and Have Not. "The Last Good Country" is not a short story but an uncompleted novel. "A Train Trip" and "The Porter" are not stories at all but six chapters from an uncompleted novel called A New Slain Knight that he wrote in 1928. "The Strange Country" is also not a story but deleted chapters from Islands in the Stream. Others of his stories were also omitted: many of his early stories from the 1910s and early '20s, the fable "A Divine Gesture," a bullfight story "A Lack of Passion," and several World War II stories, including "A Room on the Garden Side," "The Monument," "Indian County and the White Army," "The Bubble Reputation" and others. Most of these stories have never been published before and it would be nice if a book would come out with all of them. Until then read this one. But still, this is a wonderful read. The only collection I enjoyed more was the stellar "Children's Corner" by Jackson McCrae with its insight into the human heart and its wonderful balance between humor and sadness.

What so surprised me after I started reading this wonderful collection, was that many of the stories were familiar to me. I had evidently read them in school at one time and remembered them fondly. But I had forgotten exactly WHO had written them. My two favorites are "A Clean Well-lighted space" and "Train Trip," although I can honestly say there isn't a bad on in the bunch. I so much prefer Hemingway's short stories to his novels and I can't believe he isn't given more credit as a writer of these marvelous little gems. Also recommended: "The Bark of the Dogwood."

Ernest Hemingway was a master of the short story. Many of them (e.g. Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well Lighted Place, My Old Man) show him at his best. They are like prose poems, with every word appropriately placed, and with memorable characters, dialogue, irony, atmosphere and plot. His terse, simple style fit the short story beautifully. His novels suffer at times, but his best short stories are true masterpieces. Highly recommended.

Hemingway is best known for his novels, like "A farewell to Arms", "For Whom The Bell Tolls", and "The Old Man and the Sea", but he also wrote a handful of true masterpieces in the short story form, most notably "The Snows of Kilimamjaro." And he wrote many competent stories still worth reading today. What is most pleasing is his use of short sentences and simple syntax, simple style. There's nothing pretentious or wordy about Hemingway's fiction, and it is this uncluttered naturalness of his writing style that has so influenced succeeding generations of novelists and storytellers. As a writer of novels and stories, he helped make the clear, modern fiction style of writing popular, avoiding "cheap meaningless words and stylistic embellishments." Most of his short fiction is set in Italy and Spain, like the story "Hills Like White Elephants."

David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"

Hemingway's writing is a grand example of stylistic dichotomy: His prose is as austere and utilitarian as a barn, yet his stories, unique and instantly recognizable as his own, pound with energy, drama, and almost excessive bravado. He wastes no time on literary pretension and gets right down to business; writing, drinking, and living life to the fullest are inextricably entwined, and nothing matters more than a well-worded and well-placed line of dialogue.

Hemingway's subject matter is easy to summarize: he writes about the things he actively enjoys. His short stories cover safaris, hunting, fishing, the outdoors ("Big Two-Hearted River"), boating, horse racing ("My Old Man"), bullfighting ("The Undefeated"), boxing ("Fifty Grand"), war, lowlife crime ("The Killers"), even a couple of fairy tales. Basically, Hemingway can turn anything adventurous and daring into reading material for the armchair weekend warrior. With a few exceptions, the stories take place either in the plains of Africa, throughout war-torn European countries, or in and around Michigan.

While some of the stories profess nothing more than pure narration, the recreational activities of the characters usually serve as a backdrop against which they face private conflicts or ethical dilemmas. Realism is emphasized, and only "Cat in the Rain" can be said to have a conventional happy ending, albeit one that glosses over the heroine's real problems. Hemingway is more interested in the seedy side of life, portraying people on the fringes of society: vagabonds, smugglers, expatriates. An important distinction about his war stories is that he tends to write not about soldiers, but about fighters -- individualistic rebels who are compelled by the strength of their political convictions and revel in the camaraderie on and off the battlefield, often with a bottle of fine wine.

The two stories that bookend this collection are indicative of the diversity of Hemingway's thematic repertoire. The title character of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" exposes his cowardice to his wife and loses the real trophy -- her love -- to their safari guide, even while regaining his dignity in a final effort that is too little, too late. Hemingway appears to reflect himself in "The Strange Country," in which an acclaimed cosmopolitan writer takes a cross-country road trip with a much younger girl in a series of vignettes that contrasts the comfort of American domesticity with the imminent dangers of pre-World War II Europe. This is the ultimate expression of Hemingway's restlessness: The world was too small to contain him; life was too slow to keep up with him.

Hemingway is one of the finest writers this country has every produced. In these politically correct times, he was fallen into disfavor, and that is a crying shame. His terse, lean lines are so easy to mock today, but what people forget is that he created that style, molded it and trimmed it down from the long-winded, more European style of writing that was so popular before his advent. As a short story writer, he is the master. Not a wasted word, and every word carved in its perfect place. When a Hemingway character plunges their arm into a cold stream, the reader can feel the ice cold numbing the fingers. His short story, "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber" turned me onto reading as a teenager. So much came from him, and so much still comes from him. Raymond Carver, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and many others all walk a clear path that he cut through thick brush.

At his best, Hemingway is not to be rivaled. His spare, gritty style is at its best in "Killers". However, there are a few stories that could have used a little more in the way of a story line, especially the celebrated "Hills Like White Elephants". But I quibble...go out and get this one.