The Nick Adams Stories

It can be unsettling, unnerving to revisit an author embraced during one's teenage years. Reader reaction can have less to do with literature than with memory and passion. I read all of Hemingway when I was in high school, and I had quite a crush on him. He became the first version of my Jungian "animus." Now, four decades later, I reread these stories and am stunned by the powerful feelings they generate - adolescent yearning, glorious self-confidence, a naive sense of ownership of all that is significant - yes, the world does revolve around me and why not? look at how marvelous it is to be young and alive. But emotion aside, the older reader in me was pleased to find well-crafted passages and true-to-the-ear dialog. A rewarding show more book.

--from "The Last Good Country" pg. 84
"Mr. John liked Nick Adams because he said he had original sin. Nick did not understand this but he was proud.
"'You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.'"

-- on insomnia after a war wound, from "Now I Lay Me" pg.126 & 130
"I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while now I am fairly sure that it would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment.....
"If I could have a light to sleep I was not afraid to sleep, because I knew my soul would only go out of me if it were dark. So, of course, many nights I was where I could have a light and then I slept because I was nearly always tired and often very sleepy. And I am sure many times, too, that I slept without knowing it - but I never slept knowing it..."

-- the opening of "In Another Country" pg. 149
"In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains." show less

Aside from a few other short stories, this was my introduction to Hemingway. It's easy to see why he's so often placed at the laconic end of the writers' spectrum. I often found myself pausing to ponder what was meant by a character's remark or action. Hemingway also positions the reader in various perspectives, helping them see through a given character's eyes based on what is observed and how the other characters are referenced.

The compilation of stories not originally appearing together demonstrates a cohesiveness of character development. Hemingway clearly knew these people well. Much of it is autobiographical. We get a sense that it's very personal.

I especially enjoyed "On Writing," including this excerpt: "Talking about anything show more was bad. Writing about anything actual was bad. It always killed it. The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true." show less

It was an interesting idea to combine in one collection all the stories, published and unpublished, that have Nick Adams as the protagonist, but the result is a mixed bag. Some of the manuscripts discovered after Hemingway’s death are mere fragments, while the longest of the previously unknown texts, “The Last Good Country,” reads more like a passage from a novel than a story that can stand on its own. Yet there are sentences and paragraphs that are impeccable, the opening paragraph of “In Another Country,” for instance. Max Perkins held that a person who could remember and describe the way the sky looked decades ago was a writer; there are passages here that show what he meant. One is the account in “Fathers and Sons” of show more Nick recalling the various ways the ground along a trail he took through the woods as a child felt underfoot. Another story, “Alpine Idyll,” is reminiscent of Turgenev. All in all, a good read. show less

I have read most of these stories but not 'The Last Good Country". That and Big Two Hearted River get to the early soul of Hemingway, as a boy in the northern Michigan woods. The writing is clean and clear and only occasionally too simple. I read these stories and thought about wandering the woods of northern Vermont as a child and remembering what a good place it was. And of course short stories don't get much better than The Big Two-Hearted River.

My attention has been elsewhere lately, mostly on NaNoWriMo and my own writing, so I wasn't sure if I would do any more than choose a star rating and move on after finishing The Nick Adams Stories. However, I want to throw some of the blame for my current state of disinterest in Hemingway's direction, or at least towards those who posthumously pieced together this volume. I understand the need and desire for a collection like this, with works both finished and unfinished, polished and trashed, all thrown together in some sort of chronological Nick Adams life-order. Still, only about half of the stories held my interest to the end. Much of this collection drives home Hemingway's good judgement -- he knew better than to publish every show more scrap of beautiful prose he penned. show less

The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Really enjoyed the stories from the younger years as they remind me of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
Interesting how the stories parallel the author's life, good to hear them in chronical order rather than in bits and pieces as I have over the years.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

Beautiful stripped down language. Great vivid setting depiction. Great characters and dialogue Great story arcs that leave you thinking. Great control of tone and mood. Great.