“In Our Time” by Ernest Hemingway
I took a brief detour from my reading on the Vietnam war to WWI with Hemingway in order to give some attention to my own bookshelves, instead of the library’s. Hemingway’s In Our Time was his American debut, a set of stories interspersed with thematically related vignettes. Based on his spare, evocative writing, Hemingway was called the voice of his “lost” generation.
At first Krebs…did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. From “Soldier’s Home”
Note the similarity to the passage I quoted from Tim O’Brien’s Things They Carried. Hemingway’s collection, though, covers episodes before, during and after the war. Most of the “during” pieces are the vignettes, not the stories. The vignettes also deal with the blood and gore of bullfighting. Terse and well written, it’s a loosely connected collection that hints at larger, more painful truths of war.