A review by emmyrosem
True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway

3.0

I had a hard time following this novel. I listened to it as an audio book, and I'm terrible at audio books.

There are occasional moments of gorgeous depth (see below) peppered in between boring accounts of waiting around for a lion that Hemingway's wife wanted to shoot to show up.

Here's one of those amazing sections. Hemingway is reminiscing about the time he brought his wife, Mary, to visit the Spain that he'd loved years before:

But we had found the storks quite easily and would find more and we had seen the wolf and had looked down on Segovia from a near and pleasant height coming onto it naturally on a road that tourists did not take but that travelers would come by naturally. There are no such roads anymore around Toledo but you can still see Segovia as you would see it if you walked over the high country and we studied the city as though it were being seen for the first time by people who had never known it was there but had always lived to see it.

There is a virginity that you, in theory, only bring once to a beautiful city or a great painting. This is only a theory and I think it is untrue. All the things that I have loved I bring this to each time but it is lovely to bring someone else to it and it helps the loneliness.

The novel also explored themes of globalization, but the elements that stayed with me were Hemingway's ruminations on writing and travel.