Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari

Rating:
Summary: True At First Light, the Truth
Review: I enjoyed Christopher Ondaatje's book from beginning to end. It is well worth the price, and the sheer weight of the book is impressive, for although it is not a big book in height or in number of pages, when you pick it up youu feel the tension in your wrists and lower arms, for each page is extremely thick, creamy and rich, and most of them have photographs placed in them. Physically it is a luxury object.

And it certainly tells us a lot about Hemingway, particularly a facet of his life that I had never cared to peer too deeply into, thinking that his mania for hunting game revealed a side to his character even more contemptible than the others. But oddly enough reading this book had the opposite effect, and one winds up with a queer sympathy for Hemingway, and his adventures in the wild both during his early (30s) trip with Pauline Pfeiffer his second wife, which resulted in the stories, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kiliminjaro"--and then much later (20 years later), he and Miss Mary embarked on an ill-fated sequel to this safari that caused them both much grief and physical pain and he wound up writing the God awful TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT and during which he clearly went a little insane. All of this Christopher Ondaatje followed, the exact same footsteps, and his journey into the heart of Africa seems to have caused him no cavils at all.

I expect you'll like this book. It reveals a lot of truth and a lot of delicacy of perception.