Too lazy to tackle a big book recently, I idled my slow way through Hemingway's IN OUR TIME, a little collection of short pieces of boys or young men, interspersed with very brief scenes on other topics, usually violent or tragic with some horrid visual image; a man about to be hanged loses control of his sphincter, a bull gores a horse, causing the intestines to spurt out and drag along the ground, and the like. Throughout, a sense of loss or dull tragedy pervades. Where there are long passages with nothing much happening, the reader feels there is much here that the author leaves unsaid.
I liked THE END OF SOMETHING; a boy breaks up with a girl evidently perfect for him and quietly swallows his loss with the help of liquor. There is also MY OLD MAN; a young boy follows his father, a jockey, around Europe to various horse races and the racing social life – with the implication the sport is not quite honest. It ends in disaster. Lastly there's the lovely but anticlimactic BIG TWO-HEAERTED RIVER; a lonesome hike to camp and fish for trout. |
