"The Snows of Kilamanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway

I found this book while on a rainy-day walk through downtown Champaign last week. I was enjoying the cold and the spitting mist of rain, but the used book store I passed still looked warm and inviting. Its thickly carpet floors that absorbed every sound and turned everything into a whisper and closely-packed maze of shelves were too good to pass up. I don't know how long I wondered the stacks skimming over handwritten notes and signs that signified obscure categories such as, "British History, 1822-1907, Naval" and "New Age, Aquarius". Eventually I found myself in the section simply marked "Fiction" and I looked over the shelves, judging books by their covers. Hemingway, of course, stood out for me, and I picked this tiny book with its scribbled hand-written notes and strange posterboard binding, to take home. I'm glad I did.

"The Snows of Kilamanjaro" is a collection of some of Hemingway's short stories. Just like their author's life, the stories cover a variety of topics and take place all over the world. The compilation's titular story was written after Hemingway's first trip to Africa, and centers around a man who is near death, berating himself for never having written all the stories he had planned to write, and all the excuses he had for not writing them. It's a great beginning for the compilation as it gives the rest of the stories just a bit more of an underlying meaning: these were written by someone who wanted very much to tell their stories.

One of the things I like most about Hemingway's writing, and which is especially evident after reading a series of short stories, is the way carefully lifts his characters into the light. He turns them slowly and examines them, letting the light bounce off of them how it may, and then just as quietly and carefully, sets them back down into the dark corners, which is where he seems to find most of his characters. Sometimes the stories are nothing more than a brief, but revealing, glimpse into another life.

The last story, however, is different from the others in that it has a well-defined plot. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is dependent on the sequence of events as much as it is dependent on its characters. They combine powerfully though and the story stands out from the rest because of this. I haven't chosen a favorite, but "The Short Happy Life" is certainly in the running.

But the small hits of short story have turned me into a junkie; instead of re-reading "The Sun Also Rises" for the 1,985,732nd time, I picked up the restored edition of "A Moveable Feast" today. Hopefully I can get my fill of Hemingway's prose while learning a little more about the man himself. Looking forward to it.