I just don’t find his actual stories all that compelling. He had an arresting, highly influential style, but the content is lacking: plot, detail, narrative, characterization, and so on. Like that guy says, Hemingway’s female characters were just part of the furniture, and even his male protagonists lacked solid dimension. This may have been a fault of his Ernest, flat, spare style - Hemingway hardly ever _describes _ anything in a way that you can see it. It’s telling that despite his influence, none of his stories or novels have become truly iconic like, say, Gatsby or The Grapes of Wrath or Call of the Wild. Did he have anything interesting to say, or stories that were interesting as _stories? __ _

It was reading Homage to Catalonia and comparing it to my memories of For Whom the Bells Toll that finally clarified a lot of my thoughts. Orwell certainly had his faults, but reading his memoir you could actually see, feel, and understand the Spanish Civil War. If you just read FWTBT, you would get none of that. It’s a generic war story set in a generic country with generic characters that could be anyplace. You walk away from reading FWTBT without understanding or experiencing much of anything - and again, no memorable characters (why does no one point this out about Hemingway?). Minimalism was Hemingway’s schitck but honestly it grows tiresome after a while and you miss a lot of stuff that really needs to be fleshed out.