As soon as I'm finished reading Fitzgerald's classic 1934 Tender is the Night, I'm moving on to his pal Ernest Hemingway's last novel to be published, his story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal, The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway was said to have been devastated when his writer friends began passing away, starting with Fitzgerald, of a heart attack, aged 44, in 1940. The friends had been a part of the American ex-patriate circle in Paris in the 20s that revolutionized American writing, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos.
Perfect timing for my summer Hemingway book pick - HBO film Hemingway and Gellhorn aired Sunday night, in the midst of an action-packed Memorial weekend that thankfully didn't involve any perilous war reporting assignments, but did find me wondering if I'd make it through over two-and-a-half hours of the star couple's impassioned, tumultuous relationship, later on, during times of the Spanish Civil War, Normandy invasion, the rise of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler...
The movie focused on the journalist author's third of four marriages, starting with the 1936 meeting of Hemingway and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn in Key West. Casting was the first head-scratcher of this rather epic production, with British and Australian A-Listers Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman popping up in mid-century period guise as the couple emerged from some good, original footage, popping up into faded black and white to sepia, then color, complete with Kidman's off-putting pink lipsticked pout set against backdrops of bombing and rolling tanks.
Owen actually did do a convincing job, especially once the story exploded into its many dramatic moments (including a bonanza of plaster-falling bedroom scenes), but I'm a die-hard Clive Owen fan of old, so am completely biased. Kidman was the stranger pick as Gellhorn. Studying photographs of the journalist who was one of the first women in the world to report from international combat zones, it is possible to see some slight likeness, but Kidman's bouncy blond curls and that lipstick was distracting at best. The daughter of a suffragette and a gynecologist, Gellhorn would, during a 60 year career, report from almost every world conflict, stopping short in her early 80's due to her own frailty during the Bosnian war.
Their marriage lasted almost five years, not long when compared to peace time unions, but considering Hemingway's fame and machismo, her classic line of having no intentions of: "being a footnote in someone else's life" and his attempts to stop her from traveling, Gellhorn's status as the only woman to ever ask Hemingway for a divorce failed to destroy their feisty four-year pairing being remembered as one of the greatest romances of the past century.
Hemingway later won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, his sparse, understated style of writing being said to have been derived from his experiences in war.
He had published The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, shortly before a near fatal plane crash on safari in Africa. Hemingway's home in Cuba where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea as well as For Whom the Bell Tolls and memoirs A Moveable Feast is somewhere I would like to visit if I have a chance to get to Cuba some day.
Though the HBO movie ended with Hemingway's suicide in 1961, Gellman - this great love of his life, would, ill and almost blind at the age of 89, also end her life by her own hand.
Drawn to the post-war period for some reason this season, Kazuo Ishiguro's 1988 novel and winner of the Booker Prize: The Remains of the Day promises a detour from American literature into the heart of the fading, insular world of England after World War II.
Though I vividly remember the 1993 James Ivory movie version with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins,I hadn't ever read Ishiguro's original, nor had I until lately, connected the author to the more recently filmed of his extraordinary works, the haunting "Never Let Me Go".
Hanging on for a while longer in England - book # 4 for early summer reading, travels back in time to Spring 1912, as preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honor of Emerald Torrington's 20th birthday. A few miles away, a terrible accident propels a crowd of strangers to take shelter at the ramshackle manor. The Uninvited Guests is the latest novel from modern British writer, critically acclaimed Sadie Jones.This one promised a delicious read of Edwardian drama and dark surprises. A stormy night and parlor games might be just the ticket by the time Fitzgerald and Hemingway are back on the shelf.
