True at First Light (Ernest Hemingway, 1999 (posthumous))

Starting back in August 2005, I've gotten through For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. And I was ready for a break from Hemingway, but this book looked to be something different.

And it was. His son (Patrick) actually edited this for publication 35 years after Hemingway's death. It is based on experiences on safari near Nairobi in 1953. I think the manuscripts (which were extricated along with other unpublished stuff from Cuba in exchange for Hemingway's real estate) needed a lot of work, and the book is uneven. But I ended up really liking it. The book is pretty much autobiographical, though fictional. It being 1953, the old-style safari and colonial days are done for. The protagonist oscillates between his American and European mores and the African lifestyle that he seems to really enjoy. His wife kills a huge lion, using her mediocre hunting skills. He likes a native girl. They hunt and drink and talk and fly in airplanes. It's good.

Hemingway had quite the interesting life, summarized here. Injured while driving an ambulance in Italy during WW I (A Farewell to Arms gets into this). Hung out in Paris in some expatriate group after the war (The Sun Also Rises gets into this). Spent time in Spain around the time of the Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls gets into this). And all sorts of other things before shooting himself in the head. Of those three novels, I thought For Whom the Bell Tolls was definitely the best.

Also read this at the gym. (It's amazing how many pages you can cover during 30 minutes every other day on a stairmaster.)

Little Miss Sunshine (September 9, 2006)

Patricia and I went to this movie at Camelview back on September 9. We hadn't thought the trailer looked like much, but all three of our sons had given it the major thumbs up. So we gave it a try. And I'm glad we did. Six central characters in the extended family. I thought they all did a great job, and all the parts fit together. Greg Kinnear probably had the largest role - his character was trying to launch a lecture tour with associated books and CDs for a nine-step program on how to be a "winner." The movie opens with him doing the program with an overhead projector. Which pretty much spoke to his prospects.

His brother in law was the second best Proust scholar but let's say was working through some issues. His son had gotten into Nietzsche, and had concluded that he couldn't talk - so he communicated via handwritten notes, which was a neat device. The kid actor was effective and not annoying, which is pretty rare. Etc. My favorite scene was the dinner scene at the beginning of the movie when the characters were more or less being introduced. But there were many good moments.

Tolstoy (A.N. Wilson, 1988)

Read this lengthy biography at the gym. I took a break from reading this biography a couple monthgs ago when I unwittingly learned from it how Anna Karenina ended. I guess the biographer assumed familiarity with Tolstoy’s main works. So I went back and read Anna Karenina (discussed here) before any more of the plot was spoiled, then finished this biography.

This definitely was one of my favorite books of the year. Much more than a biography. I’ve read a ton of Tolstoy’s stuff over the years and always like it. Wilson provided all sorts of biographical information, but also much history (focused on 19th century Russia) and plenty of opinions on all sorts of topics. I like his writing a bunch. (Also read “The Victorians” last year and have “After the Victorians – The Decline of Britain in the World” signed out of the library (this could be an interesting follow-on to the 1759 book in the post immediately below.)

Some things I wanted to remember:

--Tolstoy’s long life – he was writing at Sebastopol during the Crimean War in 1854, and finally died in 1910 just a few years before Revolution in 1917. Went through the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and all the late 19th-century Tsarist repression etc.

-- Aristocratic blood, so he had access to top levels of society all the way up to the Tsarist household. Yet ran his mouth (or wrote pieces) against Orthodox Church, government methods, private property, war; and in favor of rights of serfs, etc. – things that would have sent anyone less famous or less connected straight to a labor camp in Siberia.

-- Inconsistencies all over the place. Aristocrat but tried to identify with the serfs. Denounced private property yet lived well and satisfied his scruples by licensing property to his wife. Made his own shoes, espoused simple food, etc.

-- Eventually excommunicated by Orthodox church; his followers ("Tolstoyans") made his views almost into a religion (and something he probably would have had trouble recognizing).

-- Interacted with many, many leading figures. Gandhi picked up ideas re nonviolence. Chekhov and Gorky stayed with him in his last years. Loved reading Dickens. Competitive with Dostoyevsky. On and on.

-- Communists probably could have used many of his ideas and his persona for PR, but couldn’t figure him out. He was against private property but didn’t like what they were doing either. Lenin was in the same town as Tolstoy when Tolstoy was doing some wonderful famine relief work in 1891; Lenin was one of the few that refused to assist (in the belief that the more deaths and suffering, the faster the revolution could come).

-- This guy named Chertkov who competed with Tolstoy’s wife for access and publishing rights, etc. Strange.

-- Wife put up with his idiosyncrasies (though I guess she had her own) and was key to getting the works done, published, organized.

--His incredible fame and stature in and out of Russia. His novels that make him famous today were 50 years old by the time he died, and everyone knew him but not for those books.

Wikipedia bio is here.