Men Without Women: Ernest Hemingway (Arrow Classic S)

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It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig ,’ the man said. ‘ It’s not really an operation at all.’ And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’ And then after 70 minutes of discussion I ask them certain trigger questions and I always see that never ending effect of eyes widening and constant eyelashes fluttering when they finally understand and then they always say: oh my God, really?! I really enjoyed the “Undefeated”, a boxer who doesn’t want to retire. The boxer feels he still has it and wants to show that he still has it. Very gritty story and gives food for thought on how we all feel getting older and out of our prime, but we don’t want to face it.

Tale by tale, the different women – unassuaged, and who can blame them – move off to the peripheries. The men apologise for themselves and are content to drift, remaining puzzled as much by their own behaviour as anyone else’s. Their stories are never less than readable, comic, amiably fantastic, human, yet with an entertainingly sarcastic edge, but verge on the bland. Unlike Hemingway’s Italian soldier, they can’t pinpoint the moment their lives went wrong; they barely remember their previous condition – and not well enough to describe it. Have they learned anything from experience? They say so. We’re left wondering if that’s true, or if, like Kino the barman, they’re really courting self-erasure. P.S. To make up for this insipid review,I'm sharing here a must-read interview,where,in his irrepressible style,Hemingway holds forth on a variety of subjects:An Alpine Idyll -- The most striking image from any story in Hemingway's Men Without Women is that of the peasant man chopping and gathering wood in the lantern light, with the lantern dangling from the open mouth of his dead and frozen wife. The peasant and his wife lived a hard life. We know that. And he was an ex-soldier who'd likely witnessed some terrible things. Both of these experiences would have altered death for the man and necessarily pushed the pragmatic over the spiritual for him.

Now imagine how different Hemingway's writing would have been if he'd been born today in the age of X-Box, Nuts Magazine and alcopops... I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’Economical and understated style of Hemingway strongly influenced 20th-century fiction, whereas his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two nonfiction works. Survivors published posthumously three novels, four collections of short stories, and three nonfiction works. People consider many of these classics.