Travel to Africa

Green Hills of Africa

Format: Paperback
Author: Ernest Hemingway
ReleaseDate: 08 February, 1996
Publisher: Scribner
Rating:

He shoots everything including the Bull
S. Hemingway once said that a writer needs a built-in- B. detector. He forgot to take it along on this safari, though he is willing to stand corrected occasionally by his then- wife Pauline for errors of 'diarrhea of the mouth'. In any case the old Hem style is truly at work here, and it supplies us with some truly beautiful and moving passages. It also supplies us with a capsule survey of American Literature as provided by the great Hem in which he finds Emerson, Thoreau and Whittier all mind and no body, Melville all rhetoric and and an imagined mystery not really there, and only Crane, Twain and James worth keeping. His most famous riff is of course the one in which he says all American Literature derives from a book called Huckleberry Finn which he then says is great to a certain point only. Old Hem in a wonderfully snobbish way tells us that America really has no literature and that we need someone with the discipline of Flaubert and the something else of Stendhal if we are to have one. No doubt he is the one who intends to supply the product.
With all the posturing and the big - game hunting shtantz and the bull which accompanies it( And with it too the morally objectionable chest- beating at cutting down unarmed rhinos, lions, kudu etc. Hemingway is at times here at the top of his game. He was young and strong and relatively happy and had already made it as a writer though perhaps not in the way he ultimately wanted to.
The dialogue between him and the other hunters is to my mind over-mannered stylized pretentious crap.
But there are passages in the book which remind you that this is one of the truly great American writers, and one of , in my judgment, the best short story writers of them all.
I want to cite a passage just to give the feeling of how good old Hem could be when he was good.

" What I had to do was work. I did not care, particularly , how it all came out. I did not take my own life seriously anymore, any one else's life , yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing , it was the one thing that always made you feel good , and in the meantime it was my own damned life and I would lead it where and how I pleased. And where I led it now pleased me very much. This was a better sky than Italy. The hell, it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but not the country. "

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lacks luster
He seems to believe that it is important to capture what they actually said since they are real characters and not imaginary, but how realistic is that? Obviously, he couldn't write while hunting so undoubtedly he paraphrased their conversations when he was able to write - possibly days or weeks later. Hemingway would have been better served by including more narratives than the ramblings of his characters. So if he's going to paraphrase then he should polish up the dialogue. And, perhaps exclude much of the pointless dribble. Some of which might not have been pointless if he had done a better job of developing the characters.

I do not recommend this book. Instead, I would rather point a potential reader of African safari stories to the works of Peter Capstick. .

A must read for any hunter
Rather than having it read like a documentary he writes it in the form of a novel. In this rare non-fiction work from Ernest Hemingway he brings to life a month long hunting expedition that he spent with his wife Pauline in Africa in nineteen-thirty-three, but he writes it in the true Hemingway tradition.

Both entertaining and exciting it makes the reader hungry for the hunt. At times there is a bit of embellishment, such as making a clean kill on a Rhino at three-hundred yards with a Springfield rifle, (probably with open sights) in chapter four. Such probable exaggerations can be overlooked when we read his descriptions of the land and of the Masai and feel the remorse in his heart after wounding and losing a magnificent Sable Antelope to the jackals.

It's my opinion that Green Hills of Africa is one of the finest hunting stories that has ever been written. Not for the sheer content of the story itself, but for the style, for Hemingway's style, . . . and for the way that he recounts a true life adventure in the style of prose that has always proven so riveting in his fiction. .

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