**spoilers**
The atmosphere in these stories is raw, without illusions and cynical. Most characters are not too upset about their disenchanted world. Ok, they’re grumpy or gloomy, but they give a shrug and carry on.
The narrator keeps from committing himself, delivering his sober prose stoicly like his characters. But between the lines he shows compassion. Every once in a while he abandons his short sentences for longer ones, more lyrical. This happens with Manuel the aging bullfighter (“The Undefeated”) who is in for a hopeless defeat. Before the bull tosses Manuel, Hemingway slows down the narrative to highlight Manuels competence, one last time. Manuel faces the bull and takes in every detail: ‘He knew all about bulls.’
A character resembling Manuel is Jack, the boxer in “Fifty Grand”. Jack is also heading for certain defeat. Not only is he old like Manuel and does he have to fight a young brute, but he also suffers from insomnia which makes it almost impossible to train. But the nice thing about these stories is that characters are never completely the same. Whereas Manuel is victimised by a commercial and cynical organizer of bullfights, Jack is commercial and cynical himself. He bets on his own defeat, putting in fifty grand. What a fright if he almost wins, against all odds, because his opponent commits an enormous ‘foul’, hitting heavily below the belt. Luckily Jack can persuade the referee that it’s insignificant, and the game continues. Afterwards he says: ‘It’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money.’
The atmosphere is not always determined by sturdy men going about their crude business. In the anti-fascist story ‘Che Ti Dice La Patria?’ the first-person narrator playfully teases his traveling companion. In ‘A pursuit Race’ a just as playful (but also very drunk) racing cyclist gets into an absurd conversation with his coach. And in the famous ‘Hills like white elephants’, one of the few women in this collection utters the maybe not exactly playful, but certainly not sturdy or crude phrase: ‘Will you please please please please please please please stop talking?’
There are many sides to these stories and they all tingle with life. ( )

3815. Men Without Women, by Ernest Hemingway (read 20 Oct 2003) Surprisingly enough, this book of short stories is also on the Guardian's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, even though it is not a novel. It came out in 1927 and has 14 short stories, of uneven interest. Many of the stories are ambiguous. Probably the best to my mind was Che Ti Dice La Patria?, a three-part account of traveling in Fascist Italy. ( )

I hadn't read much Hemingway in a long time when I found this sitting in a charity shop waiting to be rescued, so I thought why not and gave it a go. I read the first story painfully a couple of weeks ago, and put the book down after it - I'm not one for bull fighting at the best of times so you can imagine how I took to such a fully-developed short story about the sport. But I took it up again today and the rest of the stories didn't take long to work through at all. Hemingway has a keen eye for detail and his dialogue is sometimes of the highest order. I can see the genius in some of what he does, and at other times I can see why the critics attack him. ( )

Early collection of short stories. In general, I like Hemingway's short fiction best, but this collection is not my favorite. ( )