In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway

In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway

Brief Summary:

This is an early collection of Hemingway's stories. The format is a short story (short! story) followed by a half-page micro-story intermezzo, followed by another short story, and another intermezzo, and so on.

Instead of a summary, quotes:

A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park. --from "A Very Short Story." In "A Very Short Story" we get seven paragraphs - five paragraphs of sweet love in a military hospital in Padua, in Italy, and two paragraphs of a betrayal - and then a betrayal of the betrayer.

Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. There would be one more scene maybe before he got away. --from "Soldier's Home," in which Krebs, home from the war, is broken and totally disconnected from life and people and love and everything. He reminded me of Darl from As I Lay Dying.

He felt happy. Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost. He would go into town on Saturday. He felt lighter, as he had felt before Bill started to talk about it. There was always a way out. --from "The Three-Day Blow," in which Nick and Bill get drunk and Nick thinks about how he has broken things off with Marjorie, and regrets it, but knows it's final.

"Isn't love any fun?" Marjorie said.
"No," Nick said. Marjorie stood up. Nick sat there, his head in his hands. --from "The End of Something.

The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business. --from "On the Quai at Smyrna."

When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees. --chapter V intermezzo

This was living. He was through with the hotel garden, breaking up frozen manure with a dung fork. Life was opening out. --Peduzzi from "Out of Season" badly misreading the young couple who has hired him for illegal fishing.

I couldn't help feeling that if my old man was dead maybe they didn't need to have shot Gilford. His hoof might have got well. I don't know. I loved my old man so much.

and

And George Gardner looked at me to see if I'd heard and I had all right and he said, "Don't you listen to what those bums said, Joe. Your old man was one swell guy."
But I don't know. Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing. --from "My Old Man"

He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way. --from "Big Two-Hearted River : Part I"

Reaction:

These are beautiful and awful stories.

I don't want to give a review apart from saying that these stories speak to that part of me which that is sick and hopeless and feels that there isn't any hope for the future, or any use trying to make things better.

Reading suggestions stimulated by this book:

Reading Hemingway always makes me want to read Turgenev, and Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. And more Hemingway.