Customer Reviews

Men Without Women

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

These are some the best stories I have ever read. When I was in high school, my class was asked to read In Another Country for discussion. It was my first Hemingway short story, and an introduction to the novels we would be reading. I almost cried. His writing is just so gut-wrenchingly honest and raw. No overwrought explanations of emotion. You know how these characters are feeling simply because of how the speak and act. Hemingway is the master of context. The Killers is almost like a mystery story that never gets solved. Why doesn't he run out of town? What's going to happen to the big guy? I love this stuff and can't get enough of it.

Hemingway's short stories have always been hit & miss with me. Some of them don't really do anything for me, none are among my very favorite short stories, but most of them are well-written and thought provoking. Such is the case with this set.

Hemingway offers us an assortment of masculine characters, mostly picked from his favorite types of male personas: soldiers, bullfighters, mobsters and prizefighters. Despite the title of the book, there are a smattering of female characters in some of the tales. They rank with the standard fare of impetuous women that Hemingway likes to write about.

The scope of the stories is quite broad, featuring painful topics such as abortion, breakup, heartbreak and being past ones prime. The latter theme is taken up in THE UNDEFEATED, THE KILLERS and FIFTY GRAND and later on re-appears in Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. FIFTY GRAND, which details the demise of a washed-up boxer, is my favorite short story in this collection.

Stories such as IN ANOTHER COUNTRY, and NOW I LAY ME introduce motifs that are echoed in A FAREWELL TO ARMS, which was published just a few years after MWW.

Tho I've never been enamoured with the short story genre, Hemingway does rank as one of the best in the business - particularly in the American literary canon. Hence, followers of Hemingway as well as people who greatly enjoy short stories would likely appreciate this book.

"Men Without Women" by Ernest Hemingway features a glimpse into the genius that is Hemingway. I found it to be a great read during a summer weekend. I especially enjoyed the Nick Adams stories and the story about the matador fighting one last glorious bullfight (one of Hemingway's favoright subjects). "Men Without Women" deals with subjects both everyday and serious such as love and abortion. This short read by Hemingway makes a great introduction for anyone wanting to begin reading Hemingway. I highly recomend it.

Reading this reminded me why, though I admire Hemingway greatly as a writer, I am not really a fan. Men Without Women is a collection of 14 (often quite short) short stories. His stories are often powerful, occasionally very moving, but the subject matter simply does not speak to me strongly.

The two longest stories here are variation on a theme: a matador's last fight ("The Undefeated") and a boxer's last fight ("Fifty Grand"). Though both stories have a brutal honesty that I admire, neither the world of bullfighting (which comes up again in "Banal Story") nor the world of boxing is particularly interesting to me. Others, of course, who find these subjects more appealing than I would find more enjoyment here.

Hemingway is often considered a writer for men (as even the title of this collection implies), and there is some truth to that. Not only is the subject matter more likely to appeal to men, but the characters about which he write are predominantly men. Sometimes, even so, this leads to some universally appealing results, like his hitmen story "The Killers" and his brush with homosexuality in war, "A Simple Enquiry". Ironically, however, the best of his stories are those that feature women: the abortion conversation in "Hills Like White Elephants", the veteran who loses his wife in "In Another Country", and the young man betrayed by his girlfriend in "Ten Indians". These are the stories I will remember from this collection.

There is so much about Hemingway to like. His spare writing style and his ability to end a story quietly is wonderful. His willingness to tackle subjects like abortion, drug abuse, homosexuality, and the horrors of war is admirable. Without a doubt, some of the stories in this collection rise to the truly magnificent. To some, I'm sure, Hemingway is a perfect writer and I can see the appeal. I just wish the topic he chose to write about were more interesting to me.

Several of the stories that are here appear in other collections but, taken as a whole, this is a worthy read. It is short and maybe a good intro for someone wondering what Hemingway's short stories are all about. There are good stories in here, no doubt. Still, I would steer someone to "In Our Time" or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" for a better collection.

Not all short story anthologies are created equal. I have found a number of the short stories by Hemingway here in other anthologies. The premise here seems to be to highlight some of Hemingway's central writing themes- man and sport and manliness in general. No question that Hemingway is a man's writer. The subject matter of interest-bullfighting, gangsters, bicycle racing, boxing and the effects of the ravages of war on the male psyche bear this out.

In some of the short stories like A Canary For One where he introduces a forlorn woman and thus strays from the theme he is on less firm ground. And that kind of sums up the problem of the whole conception behind this compilation. Unlike Scott Fitzgerald, his contemporary and friend, who was very comfortable writing about women Hemingway does not show that same talent. The sparse, to the point dialogue we have come to expect from Hemingway gets its ususal full workout here but not a nuanced view of a two-gendered world. Still The Undefeated and The Killers ( a very, very short story that formed the basis of a movie by that same name starring Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster) are worth reading in any anthology.

A must for all Hemingway fans. What more can I say. If you are not a Hemingway fan, read this, it might make you one.

This book is admittingly not the best of Hemingway's, but it captures the pinnacle of his writing style and gift for description and leaves the reader feeling as if they were watching the tales on screen or actually experiencing them and makes them realize that this is a must-have for any collection of Hemingway works. Notice that I summarized this in one sentence........just read it.

The stories in this book leave the reader with no doubt that they are reading Hemingway, but the collection is rather unremarkable. Typical Hemingway strengths, including strong and descriptive writing of places and things, are present. But I found the stories themselves to be weak.