Product Description

The book opens on the day Hemingway's close friend Pop, a legendary hunter, leaves him in charge of the camp. Meanwhile, tensions are heightening among the various tribes and news arrives of a potential attack. Hemingway must take on his new role of leader and, of equal importance, assist his wife Mary to pursue the great lion she is determined to kill before Christmas. Passionately detailing the African landscape, the thrill of the hunt, and the heartfelt relationships with his African neighbours, Hemingway, a master of dramatic fiction, weaves a tale that is rich in laughter, beauty and insight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85223 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 candour, its nakedness: it provides a rare opportunity to watch a master working his way toward art. --David Laskin

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

Papa Revealed in Unflattering Ways
One of the most interesting stories that I have read about Ernest Hemingway described his patrolling for submarines during World War II as a booze-ridden exercise in self-indulgence. I was astonished to find that same quality described in the master's own hand in this mildly edited version of Hemingway's personal notes about his last African safari. Hemingway's son, Patrick, makes the same observation in an aside in the book's introduction.

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!

A Story
And that is what I most enjoyed about this book, its story. However I had grave misgivings about the lucidity of the Mary\Debba relationship. As Marys reputation as a protective and somewhat jealous wife I cannot imagine her as being tolerant towards her husbands "fiancee". (Which Mary does not hesitate, in perhaps a mild sarcastic manner, to refer to Debba) However there are subtle undertones of Marys anguish and Hemingways lack of clarity on his relationship with them both as he claims throughout the story that he loves them both, however strangely, no absolout comparisons. Yet this story is powerfully descriptive without the prose of one so acclaimed. One can read this book and jump into the well of descriptiveness, leave the author Hemingway behind and read the realness of it all. His awayness with Africa is astounding, his awareness of it, perhaphs somewhat indulging, is clever and very self-serving. A really enlightening read which when ends is never truely over.

Mzuri, Papa
Ah, Hemingway! How divine and irritating you are in equal measure!

His beguiling prose leads you into a sort of mesmerised state of being, so you can miss his themes in amongst the endless descriptions of mealtimes and bedtime rituals. Those rituals do become fascinating, and they do take up much of our lives, so why not, you may say, include them in a memoir, even a 'fictional' one? Diversionary tactics from the bearded one, nevertheless, I tend to think.

Hemingway's pursuit of game seems to be a transference of repressed aggression from the humans around him to the poor beasts. He's in a menage a trois with his European lady companion and a more earthy native girl, and the tensions that arise need to be released somehow.

His European squeeze, Mary, spends the trip trying to bag her lion, and whilst she certainly gets a piece of it, the kill isn't entirely satisfactory. Similarly, she finds it impossible to bag the old man and the piece ends rather abruptly with nothing settled - I think the book was unfinished? But then I guess that's how life is.

Hemingway fans will love it, but non-devotees won't be converted.