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True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir |  |
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True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir | |
Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer.
The book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary, pursues the great black-maned lion that has become her obsession and Ernest becomes involved with a young African girl whom he supposedly plans to take as a second bride. Increasingly enchanted by the local African community, he struggles between the attraction of these two women and the wildly different cultures they represent. Spicing his depictions of human longings with sharp humor, Hemingway captures the excitement of big-game hunting and the unparallel beauty of the landscape. Rich in laughter, beauty and profound insight. True at First Light is an extraordinary publishing event -- a breathtaking final work from one of our most beloved and important writers.
作者简介 Ernest Hemingway, did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century,and for his efforts he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. His greatest works include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. His classic novella The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. He died in 1961.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com Review
Ernest Hemingway's final posthumous work bears the rather awkward designation "a fictional memoir" and arrives under a cloud of controversial editing and patching--but all of that ends up being beside the point. Though this account of a 1953 safari in Kenya lacks the resolution and clarity of the best Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms) it is "real" Hemingway nonetheless. Let scholars work out where memoir leaves off and fiction begins: for the common reader, the prose alone casts an irresistible spell.
In True at First Light the glory days of the "great white hunters" are over and the Mau Mau rebellion is violently dislodging European farmers from Kenya's arable lands. But to the African gun bearers, drivers, and game scouts who run his safari in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, Hemingway remains a lordly figure--almost a god. Two parallel quests propel the narrative: Mary, Hemingway's fourth and last wife, doggedly stalks an enormous black-maned lion that she is determined to kill by Christmas, while Hemingway becomes increasingly obsessed with Debba, a beautiful young African woman. What makes the novel especially strange and compelling is that Mary knows all about Debba and accepts her as a "supplementary wife," even as she loses no opportunity to rake her husband over the coals for his drinking, lack of discipline in camp, and condescending protectiveness.
As usual with Hemingway, atmosphere and attitude are far more important than plot. Mary at one point berates her husband as a "conscience-ridden murderer," but this is precisely the moral stance that gives the hunting scenes their tension and beauty. "I was happy that before he died he had lain on the high yellow rounded mound with his tail down," Hemingway writes of "Mary's lion," "and his great paws comfortable before him and looked off across his country to the blue forest and the high white snows of the big Mountain."
Passages like these--and there are many of them--redeem the book's rambling structure and occasional lapses into self-indulgent posturing. Joan Didion dismissed True at First Light in The New Yorker as "words set down but not yet written," but this fails to acknowledge the power of these words. The value of True at First Light lies in its candor, its nakedness: it provides a rare opportunity to watch a master working his way toward art. --David Laskin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Who wants to go on an 11-hour audio safari with an aging, ego-bloated Hemingway? That's the immediate drawback to listening to this posthumous memoir-turned-novel (edited into its current form by the legendary author's son Patrick). If anyone is capable of breathing life into Hemingway's late tale of big-game hunting with his wife in East Africa, however, it is Dennehy, one of the finest narrators in the spoken-audio field. Here he works to convey the essential nature of Hemingway's character; he contrasts the sparse elegance of Hemingway's descriptive prose style against the more swaggering posture of his ever-present pride. By the time Hemingway wrote this book, he was well aware of his celebrity, his aura, his powersAwas able to flatly say, "I love command." Dennehy plays up this self-conscious quality, offering it as a portrait of the author's psyche. It's that sense of performance that makes this audio adaptation spark to life. Based on the 1999 Scribner hardcover.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
It's not often that this column gets to cite something by a truly classic author, but here it is: Hemingway's last work, written after he returned from his 1953 safari and edited by his son, Patrick, in time for this July's centennial celebration. Hemingway even stars in this "fictional memoir," running the safari camp in the absence of friend and lead hunter Pop even as hostile tribes gather to attack. But he still has time to sneak in an affair with an African girl. Along with this work, Scribner will publish three new hardcover editions of Hemingway classics: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (ISBN 0-684-86221-2. $25), Death in the Afternoon (ISBN 0-684-85922-X. $35), and To Have and Have Not (ISBN 0-684-85923-8. $25).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Hemingway never completed the untitled manuscript he began after a 1953 safari in Kenya. His son, Patrick, undertook the demanding work of editing his father's tale, and this intriguing "fictional memoir" is the result. Its title is taken from a line of Hemingway's that begins, "In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon," and this sense of shifting perspective and ephemerality permeates his provocative narrative. A man called Pop and a woman named Mary are camped in the Kajiado District of Kenya's game country at the dawn of Jomo Kenyatta's push for independence. They know that their privileged days as white hunters are numbered, so they give themselves over to the pleasures of life in the bush with conscious and slightly melancholy abandon. Mary is determined to kill a magnificent, black-maned lion. Pop is embroiled in a tricky romance with a woman in a nearby village, whom Mary refers to stoically as his fiancee. As they wait for the lion to reveal himself, and for love and politics to take their course, Pop, Mary, and various visitors drink gin, indulge in sharply witty repartee, and take stock of their lives. Obviously Hemingway would have greatly revised his first draft, but the power of his unique and resonant vision is palpable on every page as he contrasts white cultures with those of Africa, and the crimes of humanity with the purity of nature. In one scene, Pop scolds himself for thinking only of the hunt or for indulging in long reminiscences of his sojourns in Paris. He should, he knows, be admiring the beauty all around him. "This looking and not seeing things was a great sin," he muses, thus stating the credo at the very heart of Hemingway's art. Patrick Hemingway has done a fine and noble thing here, and this resurrected work will be treasured long after the celebration of the centennial of Hemingway's birth on July 21, 1999. Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Ernest Hemingway never kept a journal, says his son Patrick, editor of this book from a manuscript twice its size describing life in a Kenyan safari camp in the winter of 195354. It can of course be called fiction, however much it seems like a journal. An autobiography, say. Little happens. The threat of an uprising of local Africans soon dissipates. Christmas is coming (the Birthday of the Baby Jesus) and wife Mary chooses a tree that would make an elephant drunk for two days if he ever ate it. Daily hunting has taken place for six months in hopes of fulfilling Marys strong wish to kill a lion, a desire both she and Hemingway say they understand, though the reader may not. Patrick hints that it has to do with Marys feelings about Debba, a beautiful and charming African girl whom Hemingway would like (quite seriously) to take as a second wife if law only permitted. The lion is killed, but Mary is unsatisfied, believing that Hemingway shot first (he didnt). In time, after Mary takes a trip to Nairobi, all is well again and the two embarrass the reader anew with their love-endearments (well both sleep like good kittens). The true book, though, is less in its events than in the unmonitored voice of its author. Hemingway, talking, offers a compendium of his familiar old symbols, themes, moods, feelings, details. But the voice is also like hearing the author from somewhere beyond the grave, speaking from within his own absence. You dont ever have despair do you Ernie? asks a friend. The answer, sad in a way it could never have been when written: Ive seen it close enough to touch it but I always turned it down. Uneven, imperfect, irritating, amusing, moving, and of treasurable importance to an understanding of this massive however flawed genius of our literature. (First serial to The New Yorker; Book-of-the-Month main selection/QPB alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Corey Mesler The Commercial Appeal There is a feeling of real joy in this book...A celebration of living... the prose of a master. -- Review
Review
David GatesNewsweekA major literary event...a new window into the tantalizing, unsettling, oceanic world of his experimental, unfinished late work.
Alan RyanAtlanta Journal-ConstitutionBelongs on the top of the must-read pile for anyone who loves Hemingway.
John BalzarLos Angeles TimesFirst Light is sprinkled with the prose high notes that made Hemingway famous.
Corey MeslerThe Commercial AppealThere is a feeling of real joy in this book...A celebration of living... the prose of a master.
