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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 candour, 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.
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If you read this book as fiction, you will rate it somewhere around two stars. If you rate it as a journal, you will rate it around four stars. I chose the latter interpretation. This book is described as a fictional memoir, but I think the memoir part is here more than the fiction. Hemingway's problems with women, fascination with exercising authority, reticence in sharing his personal thoughts, and open courting of an African "fiancee" will probably make your realize that someone who can write like an angel may not have those same qualities in the rest of his life. There's a section in the book where his publisher sends a letter from a reader making these kind of critical observations about Hemingway's flaws as a person, and he is enraged by what the reader says. Yet the material in the book certainly supports the reader, rather than Hemingway's self-image.
The book finds Hemingway at the head of a camp as a sort of temporary, assistant wild life ranger. His "job" is to kill off rogue predators that are destroying villager cattle. While camped there, Hemingway is authorized to kill a limited amount of the old and lame game to provide meat for his camp.
The book is quite penetrating in capturing Hemingway's need to build fictional story lines in his every day conversations, to consume way too much booze, desire personal challenges in the classic masculine tradition (this goes as far as hunting at night alone with a spear), and becoming part of the daily life of the Africans he meets. The book's most interesting parts come in his description of the role and ethics of the person who is trying to help another hunt, in this case a massive, cattle-destroying lion that his wife wishes to shoot before Christmas.
Three years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Hemingway's family home in Oak Park, Illinois and learned a little about his formative years. His mother was the powerhouse in the family, earning an enormous income as a singer while his father, a doctor, handled day-to-day details. Hemingway apparently never forgave his mother for not being a traditional, nurturing mother of the type common in those years. As you read this book, you will see that Hemingway took great pleasure in practicing medicine without a license, undoubtedly feeling closer to his father's role model when he did. I wonder how much each of us feels compelled to play out the emotional dramas we experienced in our youths.
Work on improving who you are, as well as what you produce!
and be in Africa only these words: love on first sight....thats the life I have allways dreamed.
So to answer my own query that was how I got through it. However, had I taken it as a real, finished novel I would have had a very hard time, and in fact I have to admit that my concentration was beginning to slip somewhat towards the end.
Incidentally, many have wondered at the female main character's tolerance towards her husband's infidelity. It think it's pretty much hinted towards the end that she is no virgin Mary and perhaps to allow herself certain escapades she let's him get away with it, too.
The sad thing is, of course, that if the author hadn't "taken the hemingway out" he would have had raw material enough in this draft for several fully finished novels with perhaps a few splendid short stories thrown in, no extra charge.
His beguiling prose leads you into a sort of mesmerised state of being, so you can miss his themes in amongst... Read more
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