Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #544095 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 456 pages

Customer Reviews

How lucky we are to have another Hemingway book.
Hemingway. The very name means great writing. Alas, the man himself died, by his own hand, decades ago. No more great writing from him. But no! Fortune, my friends, has smiled on the book lover this day. It seems the great author squirreled away several manuscripts he wrote in the 1950s, and the Hemingway Foundation has just released the one he called "the African book." UNDER KILIMANJARO isn't just a book. It's an experience.

You'll have to forgive my gushing. I've spent the last few weeks hunting in Africa with "Papa" Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary. That's what it felt like, too -- like I was out there on the plains of Kenya, sleeping in a tent at night with the roar of a lion rumbling through the dark air. The book's pace is deliberately slow, which gives the reader a sense of the timelessness of the camp by the plains under the great African mountain. So we listen in on the talk around the campfire and watch birds soar overhead almost in real time. When the hunt is on, we follow both the hunter and the hunted.

The book purports to be fiction, but it is every inch a memoir. Papa and Mary are, after all, the main characters. There are several levels to enjoy -- the pure literary quality, the exciting adventure, the enjoyable travelogue, the often humorous commentary. And it's a love story, but not what you'd expect; it's a tribute to his beloved Africa: "In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable."

In some of my favorite passages, he remembers his old writing pals, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and others. He recalls how much he loved Paris in "the old days" and talks about Havana, Key West and the Spanish Civil War. These references pop up when you least expect them.

He goes from self-effacing to arrogant, sometimes in the same paragraph. His prose is at the same time gritty and elegant. Sometimes it's moving, sometimes it's funny, always it's fascinating.

The book itself has an introduction that explains the details of the posthumous publication. In back, the reader can find a glossary of Swahili terms, a list of characters and notes on the editing of the text. On the inside covers are reproductions of actual manuscript pages in Hemingway's own handwriting. Nina Smart has provided simple, almost iconic African drawings for each chapter heading.

Another version of "True at First Light"
Readers should be aware that this "last" book by Hemingway is not really new. In essence, it is just another version of the previous "last" Hemingway title, "True at First Light," published in 1999. Both are based on the same unfinished manuscript, but edited by different people & put out by different publishers - "True at First Light" was edited by Hemingway's son Patrick and published by Scribner. Of the 2 accounts, "Under Kilimanjaro" is significantly longer, clocking in at over 100 pages more than "First Light."

An important, definitive polishing of Hemingway's final creation
Under Kilimanjaro was Hemingway's last book and was an autobiographical novel about the country he knew and grew to love when he spent several months in Kenya between 1953 and 1954 - but it was completed in 1956 and is the last of his manuscripts to be published in its entirety. No definitive Hemingway collection could be without Under Kilimanjaro: co-editors Robert Lewis and Robert Fleming have aspired to produce a complete reading text of Hemingway's original and their work makes for an important, definitive polishing of Hemingway's final creation.