True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir by Ernest Hemingway (EPUB)

Description

Both a revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway’s last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer.A blend of autobiography and fiction, the book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary, pursues the great black-maned lion that has become her obsession, and Ernest becomes involved with a young African girl whom he supposedly plans to take as a second bride. Increasingly enchanted by the local African community, he struggles between the attraction of these two women and the wildly different cultures they represent. Spicing his depictions of human longings with sharp humor, Hemingway captures the excitement of big-game hunting and the unparalleled beauty of the landscape. Rich in laughter, beauty, and profound insight. True at First Light is an extraordinary publishing event—a breathtaking final work from one of our most beloved and important writers.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐No sad bitter woe is me “Gertrude Stein keeps telling me I’m not cool enough”–THE GREAT HEMINGWAY ROCKS IN TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT!!! This is East Africa and Hemingway, fresh off the triumph of his masterpiece, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, rocks hard with some of the best prose he ever wrote. Engaging, insightful, woven through with good-hearted humor and tales from his life, Hemingway–thanks in no small part to leaving Paris, which was the best thing he ever did as an artist–grooves like a blues master and his electric guitar is this book. Ignore the English teachers who proclaim that Hemingway was finished after A FAREWELL TO ARMS, the English teachers who have lived all their dreams inside a classroom, not in the savannahs of East Africa, the mountains of Spain and in the dark beautiful seas off Cuba. Cool Papa H was wise to ignore the jibes of the lame Gertrude Stein, listen to his heart and follow his road. FIVE STARS! Rock on, it’s the 21st Century and Hemingway remains the best-selling, most popular American novelist in China . . . just as in 1930.

⭐Hemingway’s earlier writings on Africa tell of his exploits in the 1930’s. This book is a compilation of his later-discovered manuscripts, edited after his death by his family. We can’t be sure, of course, if Hemingway himself would have put these collected writings together in the same way, but none-the-less, it’s an intriguing read. If you tell someone you’ve just read True At First Light by Hemingway, they might say, “Well, that’s one I never heard of.” And they’d be justified. It’s not a well-known book. Part of my motivation for reading this book was that It provided some insights into an area of Africa that I had visited some three decades after Hemingway. His approach, as the proverbial big game hunter, is quite different than that encouraged later by Kenya that emphasized tourism rather than trophy taking.

⭐Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light, edited and published posthumously by his son Patrick, has often been savaged and trashed by many literary critics and reviewers from coast to coast. Few seem to be hunters and fewer still have ever hunted in Africa. One reviewer writing in the New York Times even accused Hemingway of killing a tiger in Africa, a most difficult feat unless he gunned one down in the Johannesburg zoo! It is true that True at First Light is not great literature, but it is a slow, loving portrait of what for the middle aged white male author of declining prowess was the ideal safari in the mid 1950’s. In many ways, it is the ultimate male hunting and adolescent fantasy and shows, in stark relief, the inner, adolescent Hemmingway at his most vulnerable. The elements of fantasy in this African safari are many. First, it is of almost unbelievable length. Indeed, when Hemingway picks up the narrative, it is already over three months long, with his wife Mary having been on a vision quest for a black maned lion for 96 days! Moreover in this dream safari, Hemingway is no longer just the hunting client. Although in real life, unlike Robert Rurak or James Mellon, Hemingway never really rose to the level of hunting greatness and was guided on most of his expeditions. In True At First Light, he has graduated to true white hunter status and is left on his own by his mentor, the legendary Percy Perceval. He is in charge of the district, guiding his own safari, warding off disease among the Africans, protecting his people from the Mau Mau insurgents and showing one and all how to get the job done. And what a shot he has become. When Miss Mary finally gets a shot at her lion, she manages to wound it in the foot and it is left to Bwana Hemingway to kill it at a great distance in the failing light. Later, Hemingway and a British game ranger pace off the distance and agree never to tell the distance for it is too great! You bet. There is also enough alcohol flowing for even the most ardent of Bud Lite commercials. Pop pops a cold can at breakfast, carries around a flask of wagini with him all day, knocks back a fair amount at lunch and then really gets up a head of steam as the sun is setting. Never a hangover in this fantasy, and not much about poor health habits either, although Miss Mary does ask that he not hit the beer at breakfast on the day they are finally going for the lion. After 94 days, she is rather keen on ending this lion quest once and for all without getting killed herself. In real life, of course, Miss Mary knows of what she speaks for she once awoke in the middle of the Gulf Stream with the Papa-piloted boat going round and round in big circles, Papa having passed out at the wheel about midnight. In Hemingway’s dream fantasy, the sex is pretty good too. In fact, it’s damn good. Remember this is pre-Viagra, so the 60+ year old Hemmingway having sex three times in one night, with his own wife, in the dark, on a small camp cot without benefit of vibrators, erotic imagery on the Playboy Channel or any other stimuli after a hard twelve hours of drinking belongs in the Guinness Book of Records even before you throw in his cavorting with the African lass Debra. Debra, of course, belongs in every white hunter’s fantasy. She is a young, compliant Wa-Kamba girl completely smitten with our hero. She is lovely and proud and apparently has incredible breasts and she adores Hemmingway. She loves riding around in the Land Rover, her hand resting firmly on his pistol and hard leather holster. He brings her haunches of meat and wishes he could take her back to the US as his second wife but there are (more’s the pity perhaps) laws against this sort of thing, although not here out in the distant African bush. Whenever he is not finishing off one of Mary’s wounded animals or being in charge of the district, he is cavorting with Debra, teaching her to communicate in, of all things, Spanish. Not chatting her up in Wa-Kamba or English or Swahili but in Spanish. When I learned this, I was absolutely sure this was a fantasy for whatever possible use could this poor girl have for Spanish except to say “I love you” to him in this dream fantasy? Best of all for all white male hunters in their sixties, the wife is very, very understanding even encouraging. In this novel, Mary rather than getting upset about Hemingway’s cavorting with Debra, Miss Mary says, “I like your fiancée very much because she is very much like me and I think she’d be a valuable extra wife if you need one.” This is a level of support almost beyond belief. Could Miss Mary have been an early prototype for Hillary Rodham Clinton? Perhaps best of all, the fantasy never ends. The book itself staggers to an inconclusive conclusion with them planning to take the safari on the road “to the Belgian Congo” and when Miss Mary asks Hem is they have enough “money” to keep the safari going, he allows as how they do. Most hunting tales are an amalgam of reality and fantasy and this is no exception certainly. Perhaps one will find it a tad self indulgent, not unlike Barbara Streisand directing herself in “The Mirror Has Two Faces” or Robert Redford doing the same in “The Horse Whisperer” (“Will this film never end?”). But its all in a good cause.So there you have it, fabulous shooting, on your own and in charge, lots of sex, no hangovers, no guilt and an endless safari into the future. It is rare we see the male psyche so exposed and vulnerable showing us what it needs to survive, let alone flourish. Karen Blixen once wrote “True hunters are in love with the animals they kill but it is not reciprocated.” There is a lot to that observation, although Hemingway might argue otherwise. Indeed Hemingway seems to have always understood its ramifications most clearly wanting, “To live bravely, to die bravely and to go directly to the Happy Hunting Grounds.” Because once he stops trying, he is done. As Hemingway says in True at First Light, “I’m not hopeless because I still have hope. The day I haven’t you’ll know it bloody quick.”Reading True at First Light is a lot like watching Frank Sinatra come out of retirement to sing. You know he’ll never hit those notes again he used to, and his pacing is going to be off, but there is something touching and poignant and affirming about listening to him try. True at First Light a good read once one suspends disbelief, especially about the author’s shooting skills, his sexual prowess, the Mau Mau uprising and Papa being in charge of his own safari, as well a counter-insurgency campaign against them.

⭐Perhaps not the most compelling work by Hemingway in terms of a storyline, but his strength is always in getting at the truth of his characters. Patrick Hemingway seems as if he has edited this work well. Above all the sublime language is intact, and Hemingway’s characteristic insights into people are there. This is a worthy addition to the canon, and definitely worth reading for those who like Hemingway.

⭐this a book for die hard Hemmingway fans. It is pretty much a rough draft of something he was working on when he died. It can get really boring for extended periods. It pretty much looses any compelling need to read further once the lion is killed.I kept at it because of the imagery. You can almost see Africa.Ps. A working knowledge of several African languages will be very helpful.

⭐great book. you should read it, if you like hemmingway

⭐Thanks

⭐Very good read. Great job of completing this book. Couldn’t see the join

⭐

⭐If you’re a Hemingway fan, it’s interesting. It’s a very raw piece of work about a safari he went on in Kenya with his wife Mary during the Mau Mau rebellion years (1950s), presumably based on a diary he kept on this adventure

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