Lonely reflections
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other stories
by Ernest Hemingway
This set of short stories starts with the sad and beautiful ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, a brilliant piece of writing, but for me the rest of the collection didn’t live up to its beginnings. This was a real shame after I recently read and enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea and looked forward to delving into more of Hemingway’s work.
‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ is about Harry and his lover Helen, camped out near Kilimanjaro, waiting for Harry to either die or be rescued after his leg had been badly injured. Harry passes in and out of consciousness, tries to hide his pain from Helen and tries to help her to accept that he’s going to die. He is also cruel to her, making it clear that the best part of his life had passed before he met her, picking fights and refusing to say that he loves her. It’s a painfully evocative bit of writing, intense and yet strangely peaceful.
The other stories were more varied in terms of whether they touched me. They are brief snapshots rather than whole stories, with some recurring characters, especially a man called Nick. The format is always the same: lonely man gets on with life, always an outcast in some way, often because of war. The introduction to each story is a seemingly unrelated snippet, generally much more violent than the main story. The themes of these are war and bullfighting.
The general mood is contemplative. The moments of action are brief flickers between longer scenes of loneliness, restlessness, thoughtfulness. Descriptions are very evocative and detailed. However, sometimes the lack of action or passion is just plain tedious.
The stories work together inasmuch as Harry, hero of ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, frequently lapses into reminisces about his life – adventures he’s had, moments that stand out – and the rest of the stories could almost be more of his reminisces, if only the heroes were all called Harry.
Overall, though, after the first story I struggled to remain interested and am now a little put off reading the rest of my Hemingway boxset.
First published in Great Britain in The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine by Jonathan Cape, 1939.
I recently re-read For Whom The Bell Tolls after a **** …well, a more-than-a-couple-of-decades gap. I enjoyed it much more this time round (not that I didn’t enjoy it the first time) which was a relief, as that doesn’t always happen with long-ago-read books. But I rather wished that he didn’t have to kill some people off. Sometimes you feel that literary deaths can be a bit gratuitous, murders to make a point.
Dru I’ve never thought of it that way but I suspect I agree with you. Will be assessing all literary deaths from now on!