I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants , and you’ll like it?’ Tale by tale, the different women – unassuaged, and who can blame them – move off to the peripheries. The men apologise for themselves and are content to drift, remaining puzzled as much by their own behaviour as anyone else’s. Their stories are never less than readable, comic, amiably fantastic, human, yet with an entertainingly sarcastic edge, but verge on the bland. Unlike Hemingway’s Italian soldier, they can’t pinpoint the moment their lives went wrong; they barely remember their previous condition – and not well enough to describe it. Have they learned anything from experience? They say so. We’re left wondering if that’s true, or if, like Kino the barman, they’re really courting self-erasure. It may be blasphemous to many, but this collection was in the latter camp, hence it took me a long time to read a very short book. I just couldn't engage with the characters, plots (I hate bullfighting and boxing, which set me against a couple of them) or writing style, the latter being mostly such short sentences that it was almost like reading a child's book. In other hands, such sentences might be pleasingly spare, but here, they just annoyed me. In “Yesterday”, Tanimura, who is from Kansai, divests himself so completely from the Kansai dialect that no one in Tokyo can believe he comes from there; while his friend Kitaru, in the attempt to become a serious supporter of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, submerges himself in the Kansai dialect to the point where he seems to have been born there. Meanwhile, the narrator of “An Independent Organ” is teasing us: “I’m sure you’ll understand that the veracity of each tiny detail really isn’t critical.” All that matters, surely, is that “a clear portrait should emerge”.

The Undefeated" begins the collection and is the story of an over-the-hill bullfighter's last hurrah. In the end, his performance is merely satisfactory, and this theme of "man against time" will become a recurring theme for Hemingway, perhaps most notably in The Old Man and the Sea. "To-day is Friday" is a short play featuring three Roman soldiers having a drink, following a crucifixion (presumably Jesus'). "Banal Story" is both a tribute to the great bullfighter, Maera, as well as a diatribe against trite writing and pseudo-intellectualism. "Fifty Grand," following the theme of "The Undefeated" and "A Pursuit Race," is about a boxer who bets against himself, knowing he cannot win: though he almost does win on a technicality. "A Simple Enquiry" stands out, somewhat provocatively: a dialogue in which a major subtly propositions his adjutant. very few authors can do this. it’s pretty badass to observe what he’s done to you when weeks later you’re still contemplating the intention of one of his stories.

In 1917, Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendships with such fellow-American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style. I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’

And what to say of Hemingway's prose style! Read it when you are tired of pomo excesses- his sentences are easy on the eyes & on the brains too! He satirises the pseudo-intellectualism of his detractors in Banal Story. After his divorce of 1927 from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. At the Spanish civil war, he acted as a journalist; afterward, they divorced, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s.Men Without Women was variously received by critics. Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised the story "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands...the best prize-fight story I ever read...a remarkable piece of realism." [4]

There’s a dialled-down quality to these men. Their exchanges with other people are limited to bedrooms and bars. They have one eccentricity each: they care about reading or cooking or the history of popular music. Murakami Man, we begin to see, has no friends because, in the pursuit of convenience and emotional self-protection, in proofing himself against grief, he chose distance. He chose loneliness long before he experienced loss. As a result, he is unable to take advantage of the predictable life he has been at such pains to organise. If he fails to connect with others, he fails, equally, to connect with himself. Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”—is a line from one of the few women who speak in the book, appropriately telling off a blowhard (male) soon-to-be-ex.

I get that there was lots of symbolism and big themes in these little nuggets, but for me, there are more enjoyable ways to consider them. The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads . She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl . The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry . Fifty Grand” resembles a story, “A Matter of Colour,” Hem published in his high school literary magazine, Tabula, when he attended Oak Park High School (which I, name dropper, mention because it is near my house, and where they have a small shrine to the local hero outside the school). The story is one of a fight fix gone badly, and is really wonderful. His most famous novels such as "The Old Man and the Sea" and "A Farewell to Arms" helped him win the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. All of this was overshadowed by bouts of depression which he suffered throughout his life and which led to his suicide in 1961. (Chambers Biographical Dictionary) Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.