Word: hemingway
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...title says it all, or perhaps too much: a "simple and unadorned melody," as the author explains it, announcing his supposedly humble intentions. There are some echoes here--of Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, even Harper Lee--and Haruf's gentle novel gives off a familiar backwoods, cold-mountain whiff. This time we're in Colorado cattle country, with Ike and Bobby Guthrie, ages nine and 10; their father Tom; two bachelor farmers, Harold and Raymond McPheron; and Victoria Roubideaux, a pregnant teenager with nowhere to go. Once the McPherons agree to care for Victoria, Haruf has roped in his plot...
...then there is Hemingway's infatuation with Debba, a young Wakamba woman whom he seems inclined to take, in accordance with local customs, as a second wife. Mary notes, "I think it's wonderful that you have a girl that can't read nor write so you can't get letters from her." Such comments do not deflect Hemingway's attention from Debba's charms: "When we rode together in the front seat she liked to feel the embossing on the old leather holster of my pistol. It was a flowered design and very worn and old and she would...
There are plenty of such painful and embarrassing passages to be found here, along with some scattered bursts of the magic that Hemingway could consistently command earlier in his career: "White flowers had blossomed in the night so that with the first daylight before the sun had risen all the meadows looked as though a full moon was shining on new snow through a mist...
...book also contains intriguing evidence that Hemingway, in his mid-50s, was entertaining second thoughts about the swaggering macho ethos that his writings and well-publicized exploits had so widely disseminated. Although he is on an African safari, he is weary with hunting: "The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me." He recalls the treatment meted out to the Africans who had accompanied him on a previous safari. "Once they had been the boys... Twenty years ago I had called them boys too and neither they nor I had any thought that I had no right...
...most standards, and certainly by Hemingway's, True at First Light is a pretty bad piece of work. But its publication will do no harm to his reputation. In fact, the appearance of this book underscores Hemingway's courage as a writer. By the time he began working on this manuscript, he had received all the honors--a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954--and all the fame that any author could desire. But his body had been battered by injuries and his brain by alcohol, and the "one true sentence" that he said would...