| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.75
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.75, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Product Description
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
The attraction of this book for most readers will be the "behind-the-scenes" look at what it was like to pal around with Mr. Hemingway, and the events that led up to his death.
Mr. Hotchner has a good memory for stories and dialogue, and reports on what Mr. Hemingway said and did in his presence in some detail. He does this in the way you might adapt a taped conversation into a screenplay, so the dramatic movement is quite good. On the other hand, he is totally uncritical of what Mr. Hemingway said or did. Other biographies of Mr. Hemingway have indicated that much of what he said about himself was hopelessly exaggerated, apparently as a prop for a fragile ego.
Despite the fact that both men were writers, and Mr. Hotchner sometimes helped Mr. Hemingway edit his work, the book has very little to say about Mr. Hemingway's writing, but a lot to say about what he did when he was not writing. That is like writing a biography of Picasso and focusing almost solely on his relationship with women. Ernest Hemingway's drinking and carousing are not the reasons why we are interested in him. Although to some it is glamorous to read about endless trips to the race track, drinking endless cocktails and wine, and partying in Spain, others will find it gross. I graded the book down accordingly for these two flaws.
The book is quite sad in capturing the frustration that Mr. Hemingway felt as his ability to write left him. Because he was a celebrity, he seemed to get less than the care he really needed while suffering from some sort of depressed paranoid state (he thought that the Federal government was tailing him).
After you have finished reading about these experiences, I suggest you look on the positive side. Is there some great person you would like to meet? How can you legitimately introduce yourself? That could be the start of an amazing friendship of your own.
Be sure not to overlook finding friends where you least expect to meet them.
If you want all the facts, and want to know everything Hemingway ever did, read one of the opuses written by a college professor who got all of his or her information third-hand. If you want to know what Hemingway the man was like, read this book.
After finishing, I think it is fair to say that Hemingway's most tragic character turned out to be himself. Read this book.
Forget the criticisms about technical innaccuracies or adulatory tone; it is part of the game that the tutor, Hemingway himself, taught this tyro. Any lingering doubts can be resolved by looking at Hemingway's own Moveable Feast from this period. The name of Hemingway's game is creating literature, not scholarship or journalism.
The writer is engaged in the early 1950s and followed to his bitter end. Hotchner makes you feel the sadness and loss. Imperfections, foibles, and silliness are all there -- also some cool wisdom. And you can't match the scenery -- Venice, Spain, Cuba, Montana. Obviously a portrait of this clarity is going to cause contoversy and hurt feelings; those maligned have spoken in their own memoirs which of course are well worth reading, too, even the brittle but brave Mary -- Hemingway's fourth wife who became Hotchner's fully armed foe. No matter: she is memorably on these pages too -- immortalized as the tough prickly pickle she was.
It finally does not matter what you think of Hemingway or any of these people. "Getting it right and true" was Hemingway's code, so that the reader feels as if he were there and remembers it all down to the weather and the smells. The result is literature. The unlikely little Hotchner succeeded on Hemingway's own terms, delivering a searingly human portrait that the writer would never have been capable of himself, but certainly would have been forced by his own standards to approve.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
