Earnestly, Hemingway

I am reading Hemingway again. Men without Women - a collection of short stories, gifted to me by an intern from the UK.
The first story in the bunch, The Undefeated, about a veteran bullfighter who makes a valiant effort to come back, was pretty poignant. The story ends with a suggestion that the wounds he sustained in the ring is fatal. Manuel for whom there is no life other than bullfighting, who cant accept that his days of glory are over, who thinks that he 'was doing great' even in the final throes of death makes a sad hero. Of course one had to look up the Spanish bullfighting terms - corrida, coleta, faena etc. - and also read up a bit on the game in order to comprehend what the writer was saying. It even made me want to watch a bullfight though it sounds so barbaric and gory. (The game is so synonymous with Spain that a billboard on Mount Rd. advertising Spanish-style villas in Chennai has a matador wrestling a bull - "A home so Spanish that you will think you are in Spain").
The other stories are a bit abstract but I am making an effort.
The last Hemingway I read was The Old Man and The Sea for my MPhil dissertation. I think I will grab a copy of Death in the Afternoon, a novel on bullfighting, next.
Meanwhile I have procured Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Virginia Woolf's trilogy. Need to revive my reading habits - which is easier achieved at office than at home.