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Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
This is a fictionalized memoir Hemingway began after his 'second African safari' of 1953-54. He wrote 200,000 pages but the book was never finished; his son Patrick, who was also an African hunter, edited this text from his papers. The actual tour, backed by American magazines, was not a success. It ended in two plane crashes, serious injuries and reports of Hemingway's death. Happily it was followed by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. In this idyllic version of these Kenyan events, the narrator - Papa, of course - is made acting game ranger of a game park. Surrounded by colonial officials, bearers and cooks, he behaves as the great white hunter in the British tradition. The chief story concerns his fourth wife, Miss Mary, 'the Memsahib', and her attempt to kill 'her' lion under her husband's guidance. A second strange tale deals with Hemingway's relationship with a Kenyan girl who wants to become part of his harem. The real strength of the book lies in its evocation of the African atmosphere and landscape, which occasions some of Hemingway's fine and famous prose, and the glimpses it offers of a lost late colonial way of life. It also shows us the idyll of hunting that sustained Hemingway toward the end of his days. Published 100 years after Hemingway's birth on 21 July 1899, the book pleasantly commemorates one of the 20th century's truly great writers. Review by MALCOLM BRADBURY Editor's note: Malcolm Bradbury is the author of several novels including Eating People Is Wrong and co-founder of the trail-blazing Creative Writing course at East Anglia. (Kirkus UK)
