Afrikas gröna berg (1935)

813.52 HEM

Slow and ponderous. ( )

If you asked me why I liked this... I couldn't exactly tell you. It took me some time to finish this... but it's not something to be guzzled down as much as it is something to be sipped. I'll give it a few days to stew at the back of my head. ( )

Not being a hunter, and being more concerned everyday with animal suffering, I couldn't relate to this one. Sure Hemingway's quality writing is a constant and some brilliant reflections on multiple subjects (including the ethics of hunting) arise here and there, but overall I was bored most of the time that I spent reading this book. ( )

A classic Hemingway read; a clean and precisely-written memoir in which he goes big-game hunting in Africa whilst also providing musings on life and literature. As a piece on hunting it is quite limited, not only because there is less appetite for this behaviour nowadays than there was in 1935 but because Hemingway has little beyond the functional to say about it. He is as perceptive as ever about the act of shooting and the technique and the gait and behaviour of the animals, but unlike, say, the bullfighting apologia of Death in the Afternoon, there's no reasoning behind it, no literary explanation or commentary tied to the killings. Beyond one short passage on page 99 in which he empathises with how a bull elk must feel when hit and two passages (pg. 100 and 185) about the importance of killing 'clean', there's little to provoke and stimulate readers on the issue of big-game hunting.

The value in Green Hills of Africa, therefore, is largely to be found in its divergences into literary criticism and observations on life. This, as Hemingway writes on page 13, "is the best part of life. The life of the mind, This is not killing kudu." (a kudu is an African antelope). There are a number of great literary passages and some choice lines, including the following on page 14: "… a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence." Hemingway's opinions and braggadocio are always fascinating to read but, like the elusive bull sable he tracks in the later parts of the book, they become almost non-existent and hidden in the brush. Aside from a surprising passage about conservation (which wouldn't look out of place in John Steinbeck's later The Grapes of Wrath) and one or two deployments of polysyndeton, there's little in the second part of the book that builds on the fascination of the first. Rather, it becomes just a back-and-forth across the African bush, shooting and skinning animals: bones without the sustaining meat.

All told, whilst it loses something towards the end there is something peculiarly restorative about reading Hemingway's prose, like putting on a clean linen shirt, and that's true not just of this book but of all his works. Immersing oneself in his lines and the spaces he leaves between often serves for me as a reboot from some of the other authors I read. And whilst I recognise the limitations of the book, I do feel refreshed. ( )