Now I know that my misgiving was a correct prediction of this unhappy read. For all these years I escaped from reading him because he's one of my mother's favorite authors and I was scared and I had this premonition about the possible result of a meeting between Hemingway and me. How much I wanted to change idea, how many hopes invested on it! And nothing.
I strongly disliked this collection of stories, and Hemingway and his style lie down on this distressing adversity.
You could think that it's because of his themes: hunting, for example. Not particularly: I was actually bored by it and surely it's not one my favorite subjects at all, but it's not the main cause of these two stars.
My mother is an animalist and pacifist and probably I inherited it in an underlayer of my psyche (and Hemingway surely is a bit repetitive in his choices), but on the surface what disturbed me mostly is his style.
His dialogues...aaaah! Hateful! I hated his mania of repeating and repeating the object of an exchange of lines. Like:
"Do you want a beer?"
"No, I don't want a beer"
or
"When did you get in this town?"
"I got in this town last night".
And so on: damn it, why? It seems an elementary textbook. I can't believe that every single characters of these forty-nine short stories is highlighting a sort of irony behind it. It's unbelievable, unconvincing.
And the famous 7/8 underwater: really, I've tried to re-read some of them with this point of view but what did I gain from it? The same bored, cold and uninterested consequences. His stories don't say anything to me, I read them and forget them quickly. I had to skip some of Nick Adam's stories because I was really falling asleep. I can do nothing about it.
But I want to leave the door ajar: my mother doesn't like his short stories too and she recommended me other works like The Sun Also Rises, maybe I'll give him (no, I'll give us) a chance again in an uncertain and remote future.
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