In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

Book 5 — 3 stars.

This short story collection showed up in my little free library one day. It has a sticker on the front indicating that was purchased from the Hemingway House in Key West. I’ve only read The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea a long time ago, so I read this as a way of rediscovering and reevaluating Hemingway. In Our Time is his first formal publication as a novelist, a collection of short stories (some very, very short; see the two-page “A Very Short Story”) that are themselves interspersed by the chapters of some kind of meta-short story, which are really better understood as prose poetry vignettes.

The sensation I had as a reader was of eating tapas in Madrid, because of both the stories’ brevity and their taste. Reading a little into Hemingway’s background, I think there are two easy explanations for his “iceberg theory” style: one, he started off as a journalist; two, shortly before these stories were written, he lost his entire collection of writings at the Gare de Lyon station, and was then encouraged to try to recreate them with only what he could remember. We have all been modern Hemingways when we’ve worked on a creative writing document (or digital artwork, or film, or SketchUp model), lost it due to a computer crash, then sucked it up and quickly recreated the piece from memory. And the second, distilled version was probably better.

As for flavor, I must confess that most of Hemingway is a bit too bland, at most the hint of something, like La Croix. They…