Encapsulation

There is a legend you will have heard, according to which Hemingway wrote a six-word short story and alleged masterpiece, which I will here quote in its entirety (is this plagiarism?):

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

The boast is that this is brevity taken to the extreme, never to be surpassed. Others have tried their hands at recreating this feat, as evidenced by this New Yorker piece about a book compilation of six-word memoirs. The project strikes me as inane, akin to anthologizing the "about me" sections of thousands of myspace profiles. The feat is the encapsulation of an entire narrative into a single metaphor, and counting the words used to do this is like competitive penis-measuring (which makes the attribution to Hemingway particularly appropriate). There is merit in respecting the constraints of formal poetry, but these are not poems.

What you want, if you're going to compare the prose stylings of another author to Hemingway's, is something like this, from Nabokov (Lolita):

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.