 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||
|
ReviewsHemingway's Hunting Heroics Might Be Tall TaleBY PAULINE M. MILLARD Associated Press Writer NEW YORK (AP) _ "Hunting With Hemingway" (Riverhead, 304 pages, $22.95) by Hilary Hemingway It's easy to be cynical about "Hunting With Hemingway" (Riverhead, 304 pages, $22.95), especially since Hemingway heirs often have been accused of living off the family name. Almost 20 years have passed since Leicester Hemingway, younger brother of literary icon Ernest Hemingway, committed suicide. Now, Leicester's daughter Hilary Hemingway and her husband Jeffry P. Lindsay have compiled this series of hunting stories transcribed from a tape Ms. Hemingway inherited from her mother. This is the second recent book by a Hemingway. Last year, Ernest's son Patrick published "True at First Light," a fictional memoir about hunting in Africa based on Ernest's rough draft. It sparked a flood of criticism about Hemingway relatives editing previously unpublished manuscripts. But in her book, Ms. Hemingway points out early and often that she isn't sure that any of the stories are true. No matter, they are fantastic tales in which the brothers chase big game all over the world. In almost every story, Ernest is portrayed as a wise hunter who must rescue Leicester from the many predicaments he gets himself into. The language is wonderfully sparse, in true Hemingway fashion, and the subject matter makes the tales seem all the more authentic. Regardless of whether they are firsthand accounts or the product of an imagination run amok, a reader can't help but be drawn into the Hemingway world of adventure and risk. In one such story, Ernest and Leicester find themselves face to face with a king cobra in India: "We were sitting with our backs to the cave and I was talking about the delightful things our food pack held _ the fifth of Canadian Club, four tins of sardines, some English biscuits _ when all of a sudden we heard the loud hssss. It was the kind of moment when the hairs on the back of your neck quite truly stand on end and your heart sinks to your kneecaps." Besides the stories and the dialogue from the tape, Ms. Hemingway includes reactions of her family as they listen. Compared to the ease with which Ernest and Leicester tell their stories, these conversations seem contrived and hokey, and slow the momentum built by the stories. But Ms. Hemingway takes the book a step further to explore her own unresolved feelings about her father's suicide, or the "Hemingway Exit" as it is called throughout the book. She writes: "And now the tape was more than just a collection of hunting stories. It was my journey of discovery, a way to understand my own past. And it was an important starting point for a thought I'd been fighting for almost 15 years. I'd pushed it away and hidden it under a thick layer of carefully controlled emotion." Her long introspection into her father's death seems at times a little too personal, and it often distracts from the book's main purpose _ the hunting stories. "I'd never been able to understand why my father chose the family exit," Ms. Hemingway writes. "I had fought off the thought that it was cowardly _ Daddy was not capable of cowardice. But if these hunting stories were true, Daddy had shown the world his bravery." "Hunting With Hemingway" adds another volume to the family canon while shedding light on and paying tribute to the talented but lesser-known Leicester. |