Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209180 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-23
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
A quiet, unassuming postman develops an unexpected obsession in this quiet, unassuming--and very English--first novel from Michael Palin of Monty Python fame. Martin Sproale is the very model of a modern Walter Mitty. An assistant postmaster in the coastal town of Threston, he lives at home with his mother and rides his bicycle to work each day. It's a pleasant but uneventful sort of life, marked only by Martin's growing fascination with the life, works, and personal style of Ernest Hemingway. "Tea-drinkers, mothers, post office administrators, would-be fiancées. Little people with little minds," Martin thinks. "When would they realise that only through confrontation with danger could life be lived to the full?" Martin has transformed his room into a kind of Hemingway shrine, complete with bullfighting poster, several first editions, the same kind of typewriter Papa used--even a vintage WWI Italian army first-aid cabinet filled with all the liquors he liked to drink.

Two things happen to shatter Martin's equilibrium. First, a new, corporate-style postal manager takes the job that by rights should have been his, promptly beginning a campaign of privatization and modernization that threatens all Martin holds dear. Second, an American woman outbids him on Hemingway memorabilia; a scholar, "not a fan," of the writer, Ruth Kohler lives in seclusion nearby while she works on a book about the women in Hemingway's life. Martin and Ruth engage in some increasingly heated role-playing as the conflict over Threston's post office comes to a slow boil. Deprived of his position, his cozy world crashing down around him, Martin finds himself acting more like the he-man writer than he ever thought possible. Palin's debut is in some ways a surprise: poignant rather than funny, skillfully paced and couched in workmanlike but hardly spectacular prose. Readers expecting Pythonesque absurdity might find themselves disappointed--but only at first; with patience, this book unfolds its more subtle pleasures with understated aplomb.

The New York Times Book Review, Bruce Weber
The book's strengths ... are precisely the ones you don't expect: its dry, deftly understated wit; its careful plot and character construction; its hearty, well-formed sentences; its clever, on-the-money dialogue.

Entertainment Weekly, Megan Harlan
Throughout, Palin's empathetic humor informs this perceptive tribute to the art of manliness.

Customer Reviews

Hemingway's Chair (Michael Palin)
A little boring - a little short on content - a piece of fiction from a writer who should and could do a better job.

Clever & Compelling for Fans and Foes
Love him or hate him, Hemingway inspires strong reactions in readers. Author Palin cleverly manipulates that fact in this witty and well written tale of a mild-mannered, small town Hemingway devotee whom it seems couldn't have less in common with the dynamic literary icon...until fate and circumstance play their parts.

This will mainly appeal to Hemingway afficianadoes, but also to admirers of Palin's writings as well. His marvelous TV travel series and companion book about Hemingway's Adventures serve him well in this charming book and his own respect and passion for Papa is evident throughout.

unexpected pleasant surprise.
knowing palin only from his outstanding work with monty pythons, i was
surprised how excellent of a novel this was . just could not put this wonderful book down,