** spoiler alert ** Just a few things that struck me, in my response here. This book is quick on Read, long on Think. A positive attribute! But hard on the early reviewer. I know I'll feel something different coming clearer to me, any time I go back over part or all of In Our Time. For example, I'd like to re-read each chapter vignette and see how it links to the story following it. On a first read, I didn't catch a lot of flow between these parts, but I still find it an intriguing structure (and one which is well-adopted in Existence Costs ).

The series of Nick Adams stories were perhaps the easiest to relate to, for me. I was struck in the first how he "felt quite sure that he would never die." His father's just delivered a baby in an undeniably brutal fashion, and in the meantime the child's father has committed suicide. Neither the birth in such an ugly setting, nor the death, make sense to Nick, because he's still at the age and maturity level where he believes the world has to make sense. His own safe white American world does, always has. Nick turns to his father for the answers, yet even his father cannot provide satisfactory ones; his application of ostensible medical skill is grotesque, as is his attitude ("There's one for the medical journal") toward the agony he's inflicted on the Native family. There are no answers sometimes but self-delusion, and that's a theme I sensed winding through much of the book.

One of my favorite stories, for its humour, is "Mr and Mrs Elliot." There's so much bitter irony in the observation of the commonplace, weary, though officially "very happy" life of this couple. Like way too many others, they have no idea in heck what they're doing married. They "try very hard" to have a baby, and they socialize with fashionable well-traveled friends in cultured locales. Yet all they do is distract themselves; the whole story and their whole life is a stream of distractions from their disappointment with one another. It's at once very funny and very sad.

Without knowing a lot about Hemingway, I gather he was jaded with violence and war, and communicated this in some of his stories, in the depiction not of lives ended, but lives stilted. This is Krebs, of course, in "Soldier's Home." War ends and life goes on? Not so easily as that, Hemingway warns us. Krebs is quite a repugnant character, having lost all trace of ambition and strength in character. But he's also perfectly real: this is what trauma does to humans. And instead of the trauma being healed when he goes home, it only is twisted into another form because nobody around him knows how to relate.

In fact nearly all of the aforementioned vignettes are quite gory, violent, or otherwise distasteful, and I like the way these scenes of violence as it's 'traditionally' conceived subtly infuse each proceeding story, most of which we think of quite apart from such violence. Connections like this are, at least so far as I've observed, what make his writing extraordinary. It's an unflinching description of slow psychological violence, between men and within them.

Not that Hemingway flinches from anything. Admittedly, this is the first full book by him I've read. The dragging pace, the "scientific" writing style (and I have read various examples of this) doesn't always resonate powerfully with me. Still, I'll give him this. Every time Hemingway describes something, it is like the beginning of the world; every description is as though the thing & its accompanying sensations have never been described. It's crude and yet it helps you feel the edges of temporal and situational and behavioural puzzle pieces separated. Following the author's patient path of prose, you can start to re-form with greater awareness and accuracy exactly how each character, how man in general, fits into "his" world. What else, indeed, can be the purpose of writing?