Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (book review and recommendation)

Hello everyone! Today just a quick post. I would like to recommend this edition to you. It is known as 'The Finca Virgia edition'. As the title of it would suggests, it contains the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway. The famous forty nine stories? They're all there. In addition, this book contains unfinished novels by Hemingway. So, it is a very complete edition, it even has a  foreword written by Hemingway's sons. I borrowed this edition from the library. I'm not sure will I buy it, because I have soooo many books, perhaps some day I will. 

I actually returned this book to the library before I managed to read it cover to cover. Basically, I didn't managed to read his unfinished writings, perhaps because I don't really like unfinished literary pieces- it feels too much like a teaser. I will have to read his unfinished novels some other time. I'm really happy I read almost all of his short stories because now I have a feeling that I got such a better insight into his writing. I don't know why I waited so long to really dig into his short story collection. Perhaps it is for the better. Being familiar with Hemingway's novel made reading these stories even more interesting. I could see how they connect one to another. I was able to make many mental connections and comparisons. 

turtleneck/ dolčevita: New Yorker
blazer/sako: Modna kuća Nebo
skirt/suknja: Moda in
boots/čizme: Peko
bag: old

 

Of course, Hemingway's text are available online and if you google these short stories you should be able to find and read them! For example, here is a link to The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber

https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/303/Hemingway/The%20Short%20Happy%20Life%20of%20Francis%20Macomber.pdf

This edition comes with a foreword by John, Patrick and Gregory Hemingway. I'm going to quote a bit from it to get you a feel about it: 

WHEN PAPA AND MARTY FIRST RENTED in 1940 the Finca Vigía which was to be his home for the next twenty-two years until his death, there was still a real country on the south side. This country no longer exists. It was not done in by middle-class real estate developers like Chekhov’s cherry orchard, which might have been its fate in Puerto Rico or Cuba without the Castro revolution, but by the startling growth of the population of poor people and their shack housing which is such a feature of all the Greater Antilles, no matter what their political persuasion. As children in the very early morning lying awake in bed in our own little house that Marty had fixed up for us, we used to listen for the whistling call of the bobwhites in that country to the south. It was a country covered in manigua thicket and in the tall flamboyante trees that grew along the watercourse that ran through it, wild guinea fowl used to come and roost in the evening. They would be calling to each other, keeping in touch with each other in the thicket, as they walked and scratched and with little bursts of running moved back toward their roosting trees at the end of their day’s foraging in the thicket. Manigua thicket is a scrub acacia thornbush from Africa, the first seeds of which the Creoles say came to the island between the toes of the black slaves. The guinea fowl were from Africa too. They never really became as tame as the other barnyard fowl the Spanish settlers brought with themand some escaped and throve in the monsoon tropical climate, just as Papa told us some of the black slaves had escaped from the shipwreck of slave ships on the coast of South America, enough of themtogether with their culture and language intact so that they were able to live together in the wilderness down to the present day just as they had lived in Africa. Vigía in Spanish means a lookout or a prospect. The farmhouse is built on a hill that commands an unobstructed view of Havana and the coastal plain to the north. There is nothing African or even continental about this view to the north. ......

..... It was all great fun for us, the deep-sea fishing on the Pilar that Gregorio Fuentes, the mate, keptalways ready for use in the little fishing harbor of Cojimar, the live pigeon shooting at the Club deCazadores del Cerro, the trips into Havana for drinks at the Floridita and to buy The IllustratedLondon News with its detailed drawings of the war so far away in Europe. Papa, who was always very good at that sort of thing, suggested a quotation from Turgenev toMarty: “The heart of another is a dark forest,” and she used part of it for the title of a work of fictionshe had just completed at the time. Although the Finca Vigía collection contains all the stories that appeared in the firstcomprehensive collection of Papa’s short stories published in 1938, those stories are now wellknown. Much of this collection’s interest to the reader will no doubt be in the stories that werewritten or only came to light after he came to live at the Finca Vigía. —JOHN, PATRICK, AND GREGORY HEMINGWAY 1987

Here is a Preface written by Hemingway himself!

Preface to “The First Forty-nine”

THE FIRST FOUR STORIES ARE THE LAST ones I have written. The others follow in the order in which they were originally published. The first one I wrote was “Up in Michigan,” written in Paris in 1921. The last was “Old Man at the Bridge,” cabled from Barcelona in April of 1938. Beside The Fifth Column, I wrote “The Killers,” “Today Is Friday,” “Ten Indians,” part of The Sun Also Rises and the first third of To Have and Have Not in Madrid. It was always a good place for working. So was Paris, and so were Key West, Florida, in the cool months; the ranch, near Cooke City, Montana; Kansas City; Chicago; Toronto, and Havana, Cuba. Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them. There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope that you will find some that you like. Reading them over, the ones I liked the best, outside of those that have achieved some notoriety so that school teachers include them in story collections that their pupils have to buy in story courses, and you are always faintly embarrassed to read them and wonder whether you really wrote them or did you maybe hear them somewhere, are “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “In Another Country,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and a story called “The Light of the World” which nobody else ever liked. There are some others too. Because if you did not like them you would not publish them. In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused. Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again. I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones. ERNEST HEMINGWAY 1938

Anyway, I immensely enjoyed reading Hemingway's short stories. Some of his stories are quite short, some are quite long but they are all a great read. I won't review them all separately or in length. That would take forever because there are so many of them. Instead, I will just write down those that are at this moment my personal favourites. In addition, I will write a few sentences about them (a short review of a sort):

1. The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber 

The opening of this short story is so well written.  It should be studied in writing schools. The opening paragraphs really draw the reader in.

IT WAS NOW LUNCH TIME AND THEY WERE all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened. “Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?” Macomber asked. “I’ll have a gimlet,” Robert Wilson told him. “I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,” Macomber’s wife said. “I suppose it’s the thing to do,” Macomber agreed. “Tell him to make three gimlets.” The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents. “What had I ought to give them?” Macomber asked. “A quid would be plenty,” Wilson told him. “You don’t want to spoil them.” “Will the headman distribute it?” “Absolutely.” Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. She did not speak to him when she came in and he left the tent at once to wash his face and hands in the portable wash basin outside and go over to the dining tent to sit in a comfortable canvas chair in the breeze and the shade. “You’ve got your lion,” Robert Wilson said to him, “and a damned fine one too.”

Everything is set up. We have the husband, the wife and the hunter.  A wife is so beautiful she was an influencer before the influencers. In reality, influencers always existed. Influencers in the form of beautiful women that were paid to promote a product. The writes states exactly how much she was paid to promote a product five years ago- five thousand dollars and that would be more like ten or fifteen thousand dollars in today's money. Hemingway is know for the economy of his sentences. His writing is descriptive. He shows, he does not tell. See how much we get to know about the main characters and the setting in less than a page of writing:

Mrs. Macomber looked at Wilson quickly. She was an extremely handsome and well-kept woman of the beauty and social position which had, five years before, commanded five thousand dollars as the price of endorsing, with photographs, a beauty product which she had never used. She had been married to Francis Macomber for eleven years. “He is a good lion, isn’t he?” Macomber said. His wife looked at him now. She looked at both these men as though she had never seen them before. One, Wilson, the white hunter, she knew she had never truly seen before. He was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white wrinkles at the corners that grooved merrily when he smiled. He smiled at her now and she looked away from his face at the way his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots and back to his red face again. She noticed where the baked red of his face stopped in a white line that marked the circle left by his Stetson hat that hung now from one of the pegs of the tent pole. “Well, here’s to the lion,” Robert Wilson said. He smiled at her again and, not smiling, she looked curiously at her husband

This story is set in Africa. Long story short- It is splendidly written, the characterization is masterfully done and the ending is simply splendid- and so unexpected. Don't let anyone spoil it for you! It is a pretty well known story, so you might have encountered a spoiler or two already. I'm so glad I didn't because the ending caught by surprise. That doesn't happen a lot. 

2. The Snows of Kilimanjaro

This one is a classic. If you like Hemingway, don't miss it. It is surprisingly emotional and vulnerable. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it is quite autobiographical. Hemingway was seriously injured in a plane accident in Africa and he had felt the consequences of it until his death.

3. Up in Michigan

This one is actually very depressive and sad, but I liked it because it is different. Different in what way? Well, the protagonist is a woman. Moreover, the story is told from a perspective of a woman. The theme is very bold. There is more than one way to read this one, but I think that one of them is particularly interesting- and that one is a warning to us woman. It reminded me a lot of one novella written by a Croatian writer, written a few decades before this one by Hemingway. 

4. Indian Camp

Certainly a very important story in Hemingway's canon. The theme of childbirth is handled in an interesting way. It is a painful read, but I did feel that there is a moral to this story. It made sense to me. Plus, it is well written and flows naturally. 

5. The End of Something

This short story is an interesting insight into a young man's psychology. We get to see how one young man's emotional reaction to a break up. Part of him had previously planned it and wished for it, but a part of him regrets it.  I think it explains why men sometimes perceive relationships as 'traps', even when they do emotionally care about their partner. It is because in a relationship, a man is often the person who is considered to be more responsible. He is the one expected to make decisions, that is why they might be more pressured. On the other hand, it is not like things are easy for us ladies either. We're expected to always adapt and that is no small feat either. 

6. Cat in the Rain

The story centers around a young woman, married to a distracted writer, trying to to find comfort in rescuing a cat in the rain. The writer in the story is obviously meant to be Hemingway himself and it doesn't show him in a particularly good light. This one is quite short but it is so well written. Once again, I liked how it put focus on the woman in the story. Nicely done!

7. A Very Short Story

When I read this one, I thought it was really good. However, when I discovered that it is almost completely autobiographical, I ended up liking it even more. Why? Because it retells such a personal experience. It tells a story of a soldier who falls in love with a nurse and plans to marry her. They get separated and in the meantime she falls in love with an Italian soldier and leaves him. This is something that actually happened to Hemingway. Not that I'm justifying his later (possibly problematic) behaviour, but perhaps this hurt was what hovered over his relationship with women in his life. At any rate, it takes guts to write about something that pains you deeply.

8. The Battler

The protagonist of this short story is Nick and he seems like a typical Hemingway's hero at start, a manly man and all that. However, he is not really in the focus (or the real hero) of this story. Nick encounters an ex boxer. The sad story of the boxer is the real 'story' in this one. The rest is just framing. Framed narrative is something that Hemingway used a couple of time. This time it felt perfectly executed. I felt moved by this story. It was a sad tale but I liked it.

9. The Butterfly and The Tank

Hemingway wrote a lot of antiwar stories, but this might just be my favourite one. It is set in Spain and is a part of his Spanish war short stories. This one shows the absurdity of war very clearly. I had read it in a heartbeat. It shows, rather than tells, this incident in which a man gets killed without a proper reason. It seems there is a reason, even you as a reader feel so, but then you realize you are wrong.They say that is a sign of a great writing. You really feel something. War changes our perspective of things- you are made to understand how. The writer has showed it to you, he didn't just tell you about it, he made you feel it. A masterpiece. 

10. Night Before Battle

Another one of Hemingway's Spanish War stories, this one tells a story of a man who knows he will be killed in the battle the following day. He knows it because his commander doesn't even know who Clausewitz is or what the definition of strategy and tactics is (btw Clausewitz was a Prussian general and a historian, who wrote the first scientific book about war). But that is war. Sometimes you're a brave man who is in charge of other brave man and yet you have to listen to some idiot. To disobey an order in time of war is almost always cowardice, both to yourself and to your fellow man. It is something that is hard to understand if you don't know how the military functions. I think general public knows very little about it. Perhaps that is why veterans are almost never appreciated and often people hate them. This is all because people don't like to think or be reminded of unpleasant things. This story is also told in a framed narrative. The protagonist is a soldier who tells a story of this other 'doomed' soldier.

Is there a story I didn't like? Actually, there is one. I didn't like The Good Lion. I think it is too bitter for children. You see, it is supposed to be a short story for kids, but it is way too depressive for them- at least so it seems to me. I don't see how a child could understand the moral of this story. What is the moral anyway? That rich people are empty inside and that is why they travel so much- to run away from themselves? They experiences are just snobbery? Can a kid really get all this? Anyway, that is my impression. What do you think about my ten favourite short stories by Hemingway? Do you have any favourite short stories?