A Simple Enquiry

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.

Somewhere in the Italian Alps, in a hut dug into the snow, an army major sits out the end of winter with nothing to do. There is a signaller in the next room and a young orderly named Pinin who brings the wine and keeps the stove going.

The major calls the boy in. He asks him about his age, about the girl he says he has at home, about whether he tells the truth. The questions are polite, quiet and unhurried, and under them lies something the major never says outright. When Pinin goes back to his work, neither of them has admitted to anything, and nothing between them will ever be quite the same.

First published in Men Without Women in 1927, A Simple Enquiry is one of Ernest Hemingway's most restrained and most daring stories: barely three pages in which almost everything that matters stays below the surface. It is the iceberg theory at its purest.

Listen to the complete, unabridged audiobook of this classic short story.