"The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Finca Vigia Edition)" is a terrific collection of short stories and unfinished works that are every bit as complicated as Hemingway himself. Interspersed between the 70 or so titled works are fragments of still other stories: sometimes just a paragraph; other times a few pages from some of his best writing.

Much of it deals with warfare. Hemingway, a war correspondent, was both drawn to and repulsed by the useless slaughter of human conflict. His experiences as an ambulance driver in WWI Italy are detailed in several works. "A Natural History of the Dead" is a satire on writings from the nature movement of his day. Hemingway describes the horrors of machine-gunned, robbed, and bloated battlefield casualties, as if they were viewed through the eye of a Victorian naturalist. It's pretty macabre. Perennial Hemingway protagonist, Nick Adams, is a shell-shocked American on the Italian Front in "A Way You'll Never Be". "Black Ass at the Cross Roads" details a WWII allied ambush on terrified, retreating German soldiers. It's practically murder in the same way that the attack on fleeing Iraqis during the Gulf War was. "A Very, Very Short Story" describes what happens to the love between an American soldier and his foreign sweetheart when the armistice is signed. "One Reader Writes" concerns a letter from a woman to her doctor, on learning that her husband has contracted an "illness" while serving in Shanghai.

Ever the reporter, several of these stories deal with the lives of the "Lost Generation's" idle rich. Hemingway, a "Lost Generation" member himself, wrote contemptuously of his directionless contemporaries. "A Sea Change" is surprising, even for Hemingway--who loved to shock with his writing. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is one of his best-known short stories. It details the final days of a wealthy coward who finally discovers the courage within himself. In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" an unfortunately injured safari hunter is slowly dying of a gangrenous leg wound. By the way, this story is an excellent work.

Several of the other stories in this book defy classification. "One Trip Across" is about a few days in the life of a free-lance smuggler that makes the run between Florida and pre-Castro Cuba. "Today is Friday", written in script form, is a view of the crucifixion of Christ, seen from the company of Roman soldiers who tended him. There are additional stories of bullfights, life in Cuba and revolutionary Spain, and life in the American Midwest. There are too many to detail here.

I'd recommend this book to any Hemingway fan, or to anyone who simply enjoys a good short story and has a mind sufficiently open to see Hemingway something more than the macho, hard-drinking, womanizing, adventure-junky that he's too often portrayed as.



Recommended: Yes