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Tadiana ✩Night Owl�'s Reviews > The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
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Tadiana ✩Night Owl�'s review
bookshelves: classics, library-has, literary-stuff, made-me-think, africa
Dec 31, 2014
bookshelves: classics, library-has, literary-stuff, made-me-think, africa
I picked up this collection of ten Ernest Hemingway short stories when I was looking for Literature (with a capital L) to suggest to my real-life book club for its monthly read (whoever is hosting book club that month is responsible for nominating 5 or 6 books, and then everyone in attendance votes). Poor Hemingway was a no-vote-getter; North and South won in a landslide. But since (a) I'd already brought this book home from the library, (b) I like short stories, and (c) I felt like I needed to add more Hemingway to my life than the one or two short stories I'd read in the past, I decided to read this book anyway.
These stories were written in the 1920s and 1930s. Ernest was a good-looking guy when he was young:
Maybe his good looks and intelligence and talent made it more difficult for him to be happy and satisfied in life; I don't know. In any case, he lived an adventurous and problematic life (he was married four times, had any number of affairs, and committed suicide at age 61 due to serious illness).
Hemingway had a somewhat unique and testosterone-soaked code of honor in which dignity and courage were the paramount virtues, and that comes through pretty clearly in most of these stories. They're chock-full of violence and brutality and various types of unpleasantness:
* detailed, brutal scenes of hunting on an African safari in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
* a man dying of an infected leg in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
* a fixed (or is it?) boxing match in "Fifty Grand"
* hit men on the prowl in "The Killers"
* men suffering both physical and mental war wounds in ... several stories.
The women characters in these stories are of the ball-and-chain variety and/or actively predatory and cruel; the first and last stories in particular have some really nasty relationship issues. Some of the stories are so slice-of-life that I'm not sure what their point was.
It would be very easy, especially in our day and age, to be dismissive of his stories. I can't say that the values espoused in them really speak to me in any profound or moving way.
And yet there's something in these stories, often below the surface of his simply-told tales, that has worked its way into my head and pokes at me and my comfortable life. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is, at least in part, a cautionary story about using your talents and not letting life pass you by because it's easier to say "I'll do that sometime later." These stories have made me think a little harder about being, and doing, what is important to me, even if they're not the same things that Hemingway thought were important.
These stories were written in the 1920s and 1930s. Ernest was a good-looking guy when he was young:
Maybe his good looks and intelligence and talent made it more difficult for him to be happy and satisfied in life; I don't know. In any case, he lived an adventurous and problematic life (he was married four times, had any number of affairs, and committed suicide at age 61 due to serious illness).
Hemingway had a somewhat unique and testosterone-soaked code of honor in which dignity and courage were the paramount virtues, and that comes through pretty clearly in most of these stories. They're chock-full of violence and brutality and various types of unpleasantness:
* detailed, brutal scenes of hunting on an African safari in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
* a man dying of an infected leg in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
* a fixed (or is it?) boxing match in "Fifty Grand"
* hit men on the prowl in "The Killers"
* men suffering both physical and mental war wounds in ... several stories.
The women characters in these stories are of the ball-and-chain variety and/or actively predatory and cruel; the first and last stories in particular have some really nasty relationship issues. Some of the stories are so slice-of-life that I'm not sure what their point was.
It would be very easy, especially in our day and age, to be dismissive of his stories. I can't say that the values espoused in them really speak to me in any profound or moving way.
And yet there's something in these stories, often below the surface of his simply-told tales, that has worked its way into my head and pokes at me and my comfortable life. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is, at least in part, a cautionary story about using your talents and not letting life pass you by because it's easier to say "I'll do that sometime later." These stories have made me think a little harder about being, and doing, what is important to me, even if they're not the same things that Hemingway thought were important.
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Reading Progress
December 31, 2014
–
Started Reading
December 31, 2014
– Shelved
December 31, 2014
–
24.03%
"Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either."
page
37
January 3, 2015
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36.36%
"Then, too, [his father] was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. . . He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times.
--from "Fathers and Sons""
page
56
--from "Fathers and Sons""
January 4, 2015
– Shelved as:
classics
January 4, 2015
– Shelved as:
library-has
January 4, 2015
– Shelved as:
literary-stuff
January 4, 2015
– Shelved as:
made-me-think
January 4, 2015
–
Finished Reading
April 21, 2017
– Shelved as:
africa
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Kim
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Jan 05, 2015 02:28AM
I like how Hemingway writes, but mostly I don't like what he writes about. And I don't think I'd have liked Hemingway the man very much. He had quite a knack of sabotaging relationships.
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Kim, I agree with everything you say. I was reading some comments by a biographer, who wrote about his messed-up marriages and relationships. She commented that all of his wives were bright, accomplished, adventurous women--just the type you'd think would get along well with Hemingway. And he still managed to kill those relationships, repeatedly. At the same time, she said that she thought Hemingway, especially in his younger years, would have been very hard for women to resist.
Tadiana wrote: "Kim, I agree with everything you say. I was reading some comments by a biographer, who wrote about his messed-up marriages and relationships. She commented that all of his wives were bright, accomp..."Hemingway was such a mess of contradictions and a very mixed up man. I have an ongoing (if currently dormant) Lost Generation reading project, which led me to read books including A Moveable Feast, Sylvia Beach's memoir Shakespeare and Company, a biography of Sylvia Beach (Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties and Kenneth S. Lynn's biography of Hemingway (unimaginatively titled Hemingway), all of which I can highly recommend.
Hemingway didn't only sabotage his marriages. He ended up losing pretty much every friend he had. (Sylvia Beach stuck by him, but she seems to have been the world's nicest and most tolerant person). He seems to have been particularly bad at remaining friends with fellow writers: people like like F Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos to whom he had been very close. Jealousy, I think. And the way he savaged people who were supposed to be his friends in The Sun Also Rises is a pretty good indication of his personality.
But his suicide was when mortally ill: what the Roman stoics called "reasonable departure."
Alan wrote: "But his suicide was when mortally ill: what the Roman stoics called "reasonable departure.""Good point, thanks for commenting.
Thanks Ani!
Your review & some of the commentary not without interest but in my opinion this anthology doesn't really represent the best of Hemingway by any stretch, though there are some passages that are memorable.With someone like Hemingway, as with many composers & artists, it is necessary to separate the life of the artist from the art. Who do you know who refuses to even consider a Picasso painting or to listen to Richard Wagner's music because they think these 2 gifted men did not treat women or other men fairly?
Beyond that, anyone interested in gaining some insight into Ernest Hemingway might want to read Hemingway: A Life by Mary Dearborn. (Yes a woman!) The complexity of Hemingway the man is palpable; his gift for literary expression most remarkable for readers who can avoid being distracted. Bill
Tadiana: When I wrote my initial comment, I'd not read many of the short stories in this collection in quite some time but decided to reread this thin anthology of Hemingway short fiction. In looking at your review comments anew, I find that they are very thoughtful & quite objective as well. Some of the stories in this anthology are rather lackluster but 2 (perhaps 3) are very memorable, including the title piece for this book of short fiction.It is true that Hemingway liked everything for a time but when the time was up, he went on to something new. There are exceptions, including his 1st wife Hadley, as anyone who has read A Moveable Feast would readily notice. One of the most pertinent comments about E.H. is that often, there is more present than seems to be the case at 1st glance, a quality that can put many readers off. Again, I enjoyed reading your comments & will try to do a G/R review of my own. Bill
