OK, I tried. This "fictional memoir" was left behind in manuscript form, untouched for nearly a decade when Ernest Hemingway died. Thirty-five years later, his son Patrick, who was with his father and stepmother in Africa for the real-life events portrayed here, edited it for publication. His introduction intrigued me, and I love the title. The book's epigram is this quote from Papa himself: "In Africa, a thing is true at first light, a lie by noon, and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable." With writing like that, he almost had me. But I couldn't bear more than 60 pages or so of his paternalism; Mary's fawning for his approval; the casual acceptance of his relationship with the village woman, Debba (another "child-wife"); and finally the whole insider attitude of the narrator cryptically referring to native tribes, uprisings, and secret doings without enough background or explanation. Granted, Patrick does cover some of the latter in his fine introduction, but the text itself seems to have been written for readers "in the know". Reportedly there is some very fine writing in here, and I am willing to believe that. I'm just not willing to wade through so much muck to get to it.
Reviewed in 2017

La storia di questo libro è personale- Non quella del libro, pubblicato postumo. Ma quello del mio libro perso misteriosamente, a Kilmare Quay, sud dell’Irlanda. Mancano 70 pagine, non c’è problema, torno in Italia e lo compro. Macché. Libro esaurito, in attesa di ristampa, nessuno ce l’ha, nessuno lo conosce. Non so come va a finire il safari di Hemingway in Africa. La moglie ha ucciso il leone. Soggetto, predicato verbale e complemento oggetto delle prime duecento pagine. Intorno un Africa incantata e da cartolina. Incantata, non incantevole, perché al centro del racconto non c’è il leone, la savana, la moglie, gli africani. No, c’è lui. Hemingway. E allora diciamoci la verità a me Hemingway stanca. E’ un eroe fine a se stesso che si racconta e si incensa da solo. Il successo è dovuto a non so che. Ma non mi sembra che i suoi libri, da viaggiatore dannato, diano le emozioni ed abbiano la struttura dei grandi della letteratura. Sangue, whisky, lotta, al sole in un bar. Questi sono gli ingredienti. Ma un suicidio, gesto supremo della contraddizione umana, non è sufficiente a dare alla storia un grande autore. ( )

Novela póstuma y algo repetitiva de Hemingway. Reaviva la discusión de la impresión de cosas que los autores no han querido hacer en su momento. Pese a que tiene buenas partes, se lo ve cansado al autor y agotada en su vena artística, Tiene todos los temas, pero vistos tal vez desde los ojos de alguien que sabe que se le está acabando el carretel, Al poco tiempo sufrió los accidentes que aumentaron su depresión (que ya se ve en el libro) y que terminaron con su suicidio. ( )

Hemingway, for all his sorrow, was a man who knew he had been lucky in his life and was happy to write about things with affection. At least, that is my humble impression: he writes on page two of True at First Light that his various biographers and commentators "wrote of my life both inner and outer… with an absolute assurance that I had never felt." But as a writer his mode of operation was to experience things – many things – and absorb them and then write about them later as honestly and truthfully as he could. True at First Light might not be as polished as similar late-period books like A Moveable Feast but the nostalgia and the wistfulness and the sense of lost and captured memories do still make themselves very evident.

Any review of this book has to mention that it is a posthumously-published manuscript. Hemingway wrote this and then set it aside and there is a reason for that. Any literary effect created by the prose is hard won, only there if the reader is dedicated enough to seek it. Much of it could have been excised and perhaps would have (note that A Moveable Feast is much shorter, and Hemingway thought that he could write about Paris more truly than he could Africa). As his son Patrick says in the Introduction, only Hemingway himself could have really licked this into shape (pg. xi). However, for committed Hemingway aficionados there is still value in seeing a Hemingway work-in-progress, and learning intuitively about his process of honing his books into shape.

There is also much that would have survived a cull. Individual passages are starlight-pure, and there are the usual digressions into writing and literature and other loosely related topics which are always interesting. The part where his wife Mary is writing a poem is a nice moment (pg. 179), the (perhaps semi-fictional) recollection of meeting George Orwell in Paris during the War was fascinating (pp129-30) and the bit where Hemingway recalls shooting an old and faithful horse was heartbreakingly depicted (pp197-8) because of the unassuming way in which it was told. Hemingway writes better about safaris and big-game hunting in Green Hills of Africa and in his short stories, but there is still much to recommend on this in True at First Light, particularly about the politics and group dynamics of the hunt.

But it is the sense of nostalgia and wistfulness the book captures that is its main draw: remarkably, Hemingway manages to write such things without any sentimentality or mawkishness. One must remember that Hemingway was a reporter and a journalist as much as a novelist and whilst he may talk of "the old days" a lot in the book, it is not out of any desire to return so much as to try and understand what makes them so clear and so beloved, so that he can acknowledge them and provide a realistic and truthful snapshot of them as they were. The title of the book has been well-chosen (Hemingway's manuscript was untitled), coming from the passage Hemingway writes on page 179 that "nothing was true and especially not in Africa. In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon." The assertion that 'nothing is true' is a useful justification for what is a semi-fictional memoir (I don't really see how people classify it as a novel) and the image of light changing by degrees through the day is an exceptional one for Hemingway's purposes; not only does it alter the dynamics of the hunt (it is better to shoot at certain times of day, before the light is gone (pg. 110)) and the appearance of the landscape ("the tents of camp showed under the yellow and green trees which the first light of the sun was now turning to bright dark green and shining gold" (pg. 193)) but it also ties in neatly with Hemingway exploring nostalgia and his past from the insecurities of his advancing age, the evening and the sunset of his days. However unpolished the manuscript may be, it is a bittersweet sentiment for the reader to gorge upon. Hemingway always talks about things with a paradoxically warm detachment, so clean and precise. ( )

Staged in Africa, Hemingway reflects himself as a hired hunter in the Game Department of the British Administration. The book is set on the African plains, within and out of a hunting camp site established to hunt for an elusive and wanted lion. The book also seems to reflect on the cusp of the change over in Africa from the British (i.e., white man) to the African self-awareness and quest for independence. Though the book does not specifically refer to politics, you get a sense that the story spins on the edge of that change and the reflection of what Africa once was and meant to the likes of someone like the main narrator, Hemingway. ( )