Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Hills Like White Elephants is a short story first published in the collection Men Without Women in 1927. This story deftly and painfully captures the difficulty of talking about, or rather around, abortion. The fact that neither person specifies what this "operation" is called exemplifies their communication problem, as does the man's odd comments about the procedure "letting the air in," the woman's fumbling with her metaphor, and the tonal shifts in each person's remarks, from sarcastic to earnest to resigned. An American man and "a girl" sit drinking beer in a bar by a train station in northern Spain making self-consciously ironic, brittle small talk. The woman comments that the hills look like white elephants. Eventually, the two discuss an operation, which the man earnestly reassures her is "awfully simple... not really an operation at all... all perfectly natural". The woman is unconvinced, questioning "what will we do afterwards," but says she will have the operation because "I don't care about me". A few moments later, however, she avers that they "could" have everything and go anywhere, suddenly as earnest as he had been earlier. English audiobook "Hills Like White Elephants” is an eye-opening reading that you can listen online on our website for free.
