In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway

So my dad got me a book of a lot of Hemingway's early writing, basically up through The Sun Also Rises. Many of them I've read, including The Sun Also Rises, but also the articles about getting free shaves at the barber college, or interviewing Mussolini. And from what I've heard, The Torrents of Spring was a mess. His mean-spirited attempt to poke at some more established author that pissed him off, that just came off as pitiful. No thanks.

But I hadn't read In Our Time before, which is a collection of a bunch short stories. Some of them very short, less than a page. Just quick bits about someone being prepared for execution, or about a bullfight. The others are longer, for 4 to 15 pages, about a lot of the same things. A man trying to get away from things by returning to a river he hasn't fished in a long time, and the pleasure he takes from it ("Big Two-Hearted River".) Those stories, and several others are about a Nick Adams, growing up alongside his dad, or trying to ride the rails and the perils of that.

The story that was maybe most interesting to me was "My Old Man", written from the viewpoint of a young boy whose father is a jockey, first in Italy, and then in France. The mixture of a boy's idolization of his father, combined with confusion when he does things the boy can't understand. The limited view and understanding a child has of what's going on around them, the blind spots and the information they aren't privy to. 

I don't know if the writing style in that story is on the track to what became his signature style. Certainly not as much as some of the Nick Adams stories. In those you can see him developing that mixture of short specific sentences and the longer, more rambling sentences that are almost stream of consciousness about whatever. It feels like he leans more to the short sentences, brief statements about how he's going to make coffee a certain way. Like his friend Hop insisted. And it has to be Hop's way completely. Too bad Hop's not here. But he won the lotto and went to collect. Never came back like he said. And so on.

'All around people were saying, "Poor Kzar! Poor Kzar!" And I thought, I wish I were a jockey and could have rode him instead of that son of a bitch. And that was funny, thinking of George Gardner as a son of a bitch because I'd always liked him and besides he'd given us the winner, but I guess that's what he is, all right.'