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In Our Time; Stories

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In Our Time is a great collection of Ernest Hemingway's early short stories, which he wrote when he was at his peak as a writer. I love the way he uses simple descriptions and dialogue to narrate them, giving a more natural feel to the stories. You can see his tough writing style beginning to show already at this point of his career. Most parts will be confusing to the novice reader because Hemingway really wants you to infer what the stories are about - he will not go right out and tell you. There really is no single theme to this whole book, but it basically shows how life was back in the 1920's. Many of Hemingway's works were based on his own experiences in life, which is very interesting. "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" was based on the author's own father, who was, in Hemingway's mind, a coward. "Soldier's Home" is an excellent story of a distressed soldier coming home from The Great War. "A Very Short Story" was based on Hemingway's own romance with a nurse while he was overseas during the war. "Indian Camp" and "The Battler" are two of my favorites. It has been said that the character Nick Adams was really Hemingway, and when you read the Nick Adams stories along with a biography on Hemingway's life, it is easy to see why. Each story in this collection has a meaning unto itself, and I highly recommend that you read all of them.

This is by far my favorite Hemingway. To the newcomer: please don't be fooled by the simple style and the often elliptical exposition. There is so much more here than is evident on a first reading. It takes a while to discover the complexity of Hemingway's themes and the emotional strings he pulls because his style is so spare, strong, and perfect. Like small, meticulously arranged blocks, with brilliant vignettes between them as mortar, he builds a stirring and often frightening image of the twentieth century. Everything is here--young love, political violence, adolescent confusion, social displacement, racial conflict, industrial hegemony and decline, every sort of relationship fissure.

Sometimes his genuis is almost eerie--read "Soldier's Home," and try to analyse how such basic words and sentences can weave such a poignant, aching emotional web. His work had an almost magical presence in those early years, before egotism and the media made him self-conscious.

Even if you are familiar with his more celebrated novels, read this collection and you will be overwhelmed by the beauty, power, and honesty of Hemingway at his best.

These short pages contain simply (but less simply than some readers realize) some of the best short stories by an American writer in the entire twentieth century. Hemingway is certainly lauded enough by high-minded literary types, but it would be a mistake to assume that those are the only people that can enjoy him. It is tough to get a handle on what he is doing in this book, particularly because of the interchapers (which are NOT lead-ins to the stories following them, but a separate bit of impressionist writing of their own), but as in all great writing, the point is to make you ask yourself questions, not answer them for you. My personal favorite from this book (and maybe of any book by anybody) is "Soldier's Home" Hemingway's style, which is often criticized for being "too simple", thus ignorant, is to leave the most important details unsaid, letting the reader create most of the image in his or her mind. When in "Soldier's Home" Krebs' mother says "There can be no idle hands in God's Kingdom" Hemingway writes Krebs' reply as simply "I'm not in His kingdom." No description of his voice, no laying of scene, nothing but that pure powerful statement, which would have been ruined by a long dramatic monologue on the horrors of war. If you enter this book with an open mind, Hemingway won't disappoint. And you'll have plenty to argue about with your high-minded literary friends.

"In Our Time," the first published work of fiction by Ernest Hemingway, reads like a sketchpad at times, notes toward a novel. In fact, the seeds for two of Hemingway's earliest novels, "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell To Arms," can be found here, but "In Our Time" works better than either of those classics when it comes to showing why Hemingway mattered, and still does.

Hemingway is a writer prized for his economic writing style, and he doesn't get more economical than here. The stories in this collection sometimes run just two or three pages, and are broken up by even briefer story nuggets that read like brushwork haikus.

Included are three of Hemingway's most celebrated shorts, "Soldier's Home," "Indian Camp," and "Big Two-Hearted River," but while these and a couple of others ("The Battler" "My Old Man") are gripping enough read alone, they really come alive here in tandem with "In Our Time's" other stories and anecdotes. The mood of "In Our Time" seems more important than any message, and is certainly easier to discern.

First published in 1925, "In Our Time" expresses a world-weariness typical of the generation that came home from the First World War, "The War To End All Wars," to find their glorious dreams and beliefs shattered. Cynicism was a newer thing in Hemingway's time, and harder for his generation to digest. Presenting himself in slightly fictionalized form as one Nick Adams, Hemingway looks backward to moments of nausea in his youth, bitter breakups and parental failures, before dealing with how the war itself left him shattered. Sometimes the lens of the book moves to characters other than Nick, but it never leaves aside that spirit of disillusion and loss.

"He did not want any consequences," he writes of Krebs, the protagonist of "Soldier's Home." "He did not want any consequences ever again."

Hemingway writes beautifully and sparingly throughout "In Our Time," showing generations of writers how much more effective an idea can be when a writer leaves it to a reader to work it out. No story better illustrates his singular command than "Big Two-Hearted River," an elegy and grace note in two parts for all that comes before, as Nick recaptures a sense of peace fishing for trout on a river. It's one of the longest stories, and may seem aimless to a first-time reader as it focuses on the nitty-gritty of Nick's routine, but the more you read it, the more drawn in you become, until you feel like you are on that river with Nick, plucking black grasshoppers off the tall grass.

People say Frank Sinatra did the first concept album with "In The Wee Small Hours," but it seems to me Hemingway had him beat by some 30 years with these tone poems of stunning narrative craft.

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway is a collection of short stories set amidst a time after the period of World War I. Several of Hemingway's early classics are included in this incredible novel such as "Indian Camp," "The Battler," and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." If the reader can look past the drinking scenes, each individual story presents a variety of characters, themes and plots, all of which deal with different aspects of life. His unique style of short, simple and declarative sentences enables easy reading for any person. Hemingway, as a man, writes with dignity and a genuine mansculine charm. The stories of love lost, relationships, nature and war are intense-- recommended In Our Time, a classic.

I admit, when I first read The Sun Also Rises for a class on Mondern Literature, I was not enamored. It struck me as overly minimalistic and angst-ridden.

Now that I'm taking another Modern Literature class, four years later, I actually found I enjoyed Hemingway this time around. I read the book through twice before writing an essay on it and found I had a much better grip on it for the redundant reading. Some of the fifteen stories in particular are more striking than others (I personally was drawn to "The Three Day Blow," "Soldier's Home," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "Mr. and Mrs. Eliott," and "Big Two-Hearted River"), but really it takes the collection taken as a whole to achieve its full effect.

Really, each story is made up of two parts: there's the main story, then there is a 40-200 word italicized section at the beginning of each story. The two sections are in no way related to each other plotwise, but they seem to very subtly comment, inform, and enhance each one another.

Hemingway comes at the reader with a plethora of voices, rhythms, and issues that, while they are not always related to one another (though about half the stories employ the same character, Nick Adams), are necessary to be taken as a whole to get the entire experience of what he's trying to say. His favorite themes seem to be war, violence (not necessarily always the war kind), loss (in many, many forms), the healing power of nature, and the right way to live. Each story generally has a little bit to inform the reader about each, and then the last story, "Big Two-Hearted River," picks up and completes all these threads. Especially the second time through, this culmination was quite an experience.

Overall, In Our Time is a very quick and painless read, but rewards deeper contemplation. If the themes I listed above are of interest, then I recommend. If contemplative, minimalist writing is favored, then I recommend. If you're looking for excitement or an obvious message, then I don't recomment. It's as simple and complex as that.

This is not my review, it belongs to D. H. Lawrence (b1885-d1930) as I read it in the book 'Selected Literary Criticism', edited by Anthony Beal. I'm copying Lawrence's review of Hemingway's 'In Our Time' here because it is an outstanding review others who come to Amazon ought to read:

" In Our Time is the last of the four American books, and Mr. Hemingway has accepted the goal. He keeps on making flights, but he has no illusion about landing anywhere. He knows it will be nowhere every time.

In Our Time calls itself a book of stories, but it isn't that. It is a series of successive sketches from a man's life, and makes a fragmentary novel. The first scenes, by one of the big lakes in America--probably Superior--are the best; when Nick is a boy. Then come fragments of war--on the Italian front. Then a soldier back home, very late, in the little town way west in Oklahoma. Then a young American and wife in post-war Europe; a long sketch about an American jockey in Milan and Paris; then Nick is back again in the Lake Superior region, getting off the train at a burnt-out town, and tramping across the empty country to camp by a trout-stream. Trout is the one passion life has him--and this won't last long.

It is a short book: and it does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man's life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent. (The 'mottoes' in front seem a little affected.) And these few sketches are enough to create the man and all his history: we need know no more.

Nick is a type one meets in the more wild and woolly regions of the United States. He is the remains of the lone trapper and cowboy. Nowadays he is educated, and through with everything. It is a state of conscious, accepted indifference to everything except freedom from work and the moment's interest. Mr. Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. Pne wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don't get connected up. If oyu get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! `Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that!

Mr. Hemingway's sketches, for this reason, are excellent: so short, like striking a match, lighting a brief sensational cigarette, and it's over. His young love-affair ends as one throws a cigarette-end away. `It isn't fun any more.'--`Everything's gone to hell inside me.'

It is really honest. And it explains a great deal of sentimentality. When a thing has gone to hell inside you, your sentimentalism tries to pretend it hasn't. But Mr. Hemingway is through with the sentimentalism. `It isn't fun any more. I guess I'll beat it.'

And he beats it, to somewhere else. In the end he'll be a sort of tramp, endlessly moving on for the sake of moving away from where he is. This is a negative goal, and Mr. Hemingway is really good, because he's perfectly straight about it. He is like Krebs, in that devastating Oklahoma sketch: he doesn't love anybody, and it nauseates him to have to pretend he does. He doesn't even want to love anybody; he doesn't want to go anywhere, he doesn't want to do anything. He wants just to lounge around and maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside himself. And why shouldn't he, since that is exactly and sincerely what he feels? If he really doesn't care, then why should he care? Anyhow, he doesn't."

Short stories are beautiful bedtime reading, enough to slow your thoughts and remove you from the stresses of the day. This collection is Hemingway's very best, his American debut from 1925. The stories are concise, yet rich with detail and feeling. My personal favorite, "A Very Short Story," is less than two pages, but it expresses everything it needs to. As is Hemingway's style, he doesn't hand stories to the reader. You jump in head first and have to figure out where you are and what you're doing there. Each one of these tales is truly an adventure not to be missed.

The story goes, that when Ernest Hemingway's parents first received copies of In Our Time, they were horrified and furious. His old man sent the books back to the publisher. A year later, in a letter to his father, Hemingway explained to his father what it was he was attempting as a young writer: "You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful."

We know Hemingway more for his off-the-page exploits than those he published, but in these short pieces, peppered with very short (mostly one page) pieces, Hemingway first introduces his hard-boiled style to an American audience. An earlier, much shorter version of this book was published the year before in Paris. Hemingway expects something of his readers. Much remembered for his belief that a good writer can say much more by employing omission than by saying too much, he leaves the job of applying sentiment and emotion to the reader.

Hemingway is the master of the understated short story. He takes simple themes and without use of superlatives, makes it real. This book is a collection of short stories where most feature a man name Nick, from his time as a young boy to manhood as it closes with two stories about him fishing. There is one story where no male name is given, so it may also be about Nick.
The most gripping story is "Soldier's Home", which features a character called Krebs. He is back in Kansas after serving in the European theater in World War I. Unlike many of his fellow Americans, he did not return until the middle of 1919, so he missed most of the ecstasy of the welcome-home parades. Krebs has difficulty coming back to what he left in Kansas. He has no interest in women, a job or anything that could lead to a bettering of his current condition. Living with his parents, they are growing disturbed at his listlessness, his mother sits down with him and wants to pray for his changing. While Krebs vows to change, it is not a heartfelt pronouncement, rather it is more of a "whatever" change in his attitude.
Given his experience, Hemingway knew war. But he also knew the difficulties of peace for men of war and a great deal about the simpler challenges of life. Much of that knowledge and experience is demonstrated in these stories.