Hemingway, Borges, and Kelly.

I read two short stories for the fiction writing class today–“Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges.

The Hemingway story was good though I have to admit I had trouble with the imagery and found the dialogue odd. Did people really converse that way eighty or so years ago? They didn’t say what was really on their minds, at least according to the analysis and an article I read about the story on Wikipedia. The analysis is much longer than the original story. Some people spent a lot of time deciphering the imagery. I thank them for that.

I found “Library of Babel” a struggle to read. From what I gathered, the author is explaining some futuristic library which may or may not be the universe. In any event, it wasn’t about people so I found it uninteresting.

The third reading was “You and Your Characters” by James Patrick Kelly. It was a good article explaining the different types of characters in fiction. I particularly liked the section where he says we can tell and not have to show to explain characters, particularly minor characters.