Winner Take Nothing in The Importance of Reading Ernest

From the Bookshelf of The Importance of Reading Ernest…

Winner Take Nothing

Ernest Hemingway

Start date: May 6, 2009

Finish date: May 31, 2009

Discussion: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Why we're reading this: Our Next Story:

Others we've read from this book: The Sea Change; A Clean Well-Lighted Place; …more
[close] Our Next Story:

Others we've read from this book: The Sea Change; A Clean Well-Lighted Place;

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 3 topics — 24 comments total

A Clean Well-Lighted Place

First Impressions
By Brad · 14 posts · 49 views

last updated Feb 11, 2010 11:31AM

The Scene
By Brad · 4 posts · 17 views

last updated May 18, 2009 07:43AM

What Members Thought

May 30, 2009 Shane rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I picked up a Hemingway book after nearly 30 years. And yet he was a formative influence on me as a writer. The book reinforced to me that "dialogue is everything", nobody wins, but everyone changes, punctuation needs to be used for rhythm, actions are harder to describe indirectly but are more powerful when done that way, word repetitions are okay if they create effect, passive voice for scene setting is okay, and sentences that run along like this one are great - all taboos with today's writin I picked up a Hemingway book after nearly 30 years. And yet he was a formative influence on me as a writer. The book reinforced to me that "dialogue is everything", nobody wins, but everyone changes, punctuation needs to be used for rhythm, actions are harder to describe indirectly but are more powerful when done that way, word repetitions are okay if they create effect, passive voice for scene setting is okay, and sentences that run along like this one are great - all taboos with today's writing schools and editors. To his credit, Hemingway may have pleased the pundits with his technique, which is 99% show rather than tell.

Many of the scenes in this collection centre around a bar or restaurant with plenty of alcohol to oil the wheels. The time shift in a scene set in a Swiss restaurant, a scene that seems to repeat itself over and over again, is only indicated by the changing of the room's decor. Normal people are contrasted with conflicted ones,the horrors of war are described in indirect but dramatic detail (the dead always have out-turned pockets and papers scattered abouth them, in addition to flies), teenagers have sex in the woods and the reader discovers this only in the dialogue occuring around the event. Hemingway is audacious by having the characters in a story set in Wyoming run through most of their dialogue in French - however the structure and content was such that this anglophone got it!

He frequently uses a panoramic viewpoint, focussing on an entire scene before zooming down to a character's POV within it - very cinematic. And his characters sometimes do not have names, nor are we clear of their sex - all part of his minimalistic technique. But he is still able to create memorable atmoshere out of the most original situations: the shell-shocked soldier roaming the battlefront, the couple breaking-up in a Paris restaurant, the boy and his father hunting in the woods, the scavenging sailor seeking his pot of gold in a wreck just out of reach, the three whores in a railway station, the self-absorbed bullfighter, the gambler suffering from gangerene with a bullet in his belly, and the nun praying to God that her favourite baseball team wins.

I felt liberated reading this book and wanted to raise a glass with Papa Hem (if he was still alive) saying, "Damn those who try to teach us to write. Writing comes from within, let no writing instructor, editor or publisher put us under."
...more

28 likes · Like · see review

Mar 30, 2014 Andy Miller rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This collection of short stories was first published in 1933, 4 years after he wrote Farewell to Arms. It includes one of my all time favorite stories, "A Clean Well Lighted Place" That story's dialogue between two waiters who are waiting for their last customer, a lonely, deaf old man, to leave is simple, straightforward, and short but says more about loneliness, compassion, estrangement, and empathy than any novel fifty times as long

"The Light of the World" is another story that is almost dial ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Mar 21, 2009 Brad rated it it was amazing

Shelves: faves, hemingway

The Sea Change -- This story represents much that Hemingway is great at, distilled to its most fundamental.

He makes us feel his characters in a heart beat. The Sea Change is three and a half pages, yet we know almost everything we need to know about Phil and the Girl instantly, and Hemingway makes us care.

He also expresses setting so perfectly and sparingly that we feel we're in this tiny bar in Paris, yet the description of the bar is implied, mirrored in his descriptions of the couple and Jam ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Jan 15, 2012 Ke rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Like Hemingway's other writings, the stories in this collection have a lot of beauty and depth. I especially like how carefully he unfolds the characters' peculiarities and their desires. However, I thought that the dialogue in "Wine of Wyoming" was a bit too confusing, because of all the "Frenchisms." ...more

Like · see review