4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Grab your drink and your chez lounge, October 24, 2009
What a great escape! This is a wonderful book to throw in your beach bag. Make sure you pack a cold cocktail (or three) and maybe a platter of shrimp. It was great to get out of day to day reality and jump into the past, with a great blend of a real time and place, wrapped around both true and fictional events and that enshroud the real, but fictionalized character of Ernest Hemingway. This bridged the gaps between summer escape novel, historical fiction and mystery. A sordid, sexy, steamy romp. Atkinson paints a rich tapestry to be savored. A page-turner, that keeps you glued till the end.
-Susan B.
New York
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fictional Hemingway Entertains, September 1, 2010
I once had a Hemingway Year. I started the year in Tanzania studying field biology and reading Hemingway out of the Arusha library. A couple months later I was in Europe reading more Hemingway out of another library. My timing was good and I hitchhiked to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls (La Feria de San Fermin).
My interest in Ernest Hemingway led me to Michael Atkinson's first novel, Hemingway Deadlights. I enjoy books where the author fictionalizes the lives of writers whose work I know.
Atkinson picks up with Hemingway in 1956, years after the wars and Hemingway's life in Europe. The US is heavy into Cuba, Castro is an outlaw, and there are vestiges of the McCarthy-era paranoia. Hemingway is on his fourth wife, Mary, and staying at his home in Key West while Mary waits for him in Cuba. The wave he rode after winning of the Noble Prize in Literature for The Old Man and the Sea is waning and Hemingway is writing sporadically, drinking heavily, and breaks his leg when he falls of the roof while shooting at a gecko.
When a casual friend of Hemingway's is murdered, the local officials pay little attention. Hemingway, with his wariness towards authority, assumes clandestine issues are afoot. With this premise, Atkinson creates Ernest Hemingway; murder investigator.
Early in the book, I found Atkinson's portrayal of Hemingway to be overly bumbling and absurd. For example, Atkinson wrote, "Hemingway leapt. Too far, as it happens - like a flying squirrel, the man's khaki-dressed, potbellied frame soared narrowly over the top of the tree, immediately beyond which lay a rock garden, rose bushes, and more cement." Hemingway is too real a person for me, the detail and ridiculousness of the tone fit more with the behavior of Janet Evanovich's character, Stephanie Plum, than author and adventurer Ernest Hemingway.
Atkinson stopped trying to remake Hemingway as the character got into the murder investigation. There was Hemingway's drinking and womanizing and the self-confident behavior grounded in a lifetime of machismo, adventure, and notoriety. It was enjoyable to be transported to the nascent tourist mecca of Key West where Hemingway was dining at Sloppy Joe's and taking a ferry to Cuba. The Hemingway character finally felt like Hemingway.
With Hemingway Deadlights, Atkinson has written an entertaining novel both for Hemingway fans and for others who are not familiar with his work. The character finds himself in situations that draw upon the Hoover-era energy of distrust common at the time. Hemingway meets Castro and Che, has problems with a variety of feds, and is threatened by shadowy underworld figures. I found lots of references to the Hemingway life the world has been aware of, and to events and attitudes that created Hemingway's voice. I look forward to reading Atkinson's second Hemingway novel, released earlier this year. (Initially submitted to Luxury Reading's website.)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hemingway as he should have been, August 18, 2009
[...]
Set in 1956, this first outing in a new series featuring Ernest Hemingway as sleuth finds the graying Nobel laureate with his leg in a plaster cast after getting plastered and falling off the roof of his Key West home where he's holed up for some creative drinking away from the sour, disapproving gaze of über-bitch wife, Mary (a wonderfully nasty characterization) back in Cuba. His quiet bender, alas, soon is rudely disrupted by the unusual murder of a fisherman/smuggler crony. Angered by the cops' shelving the case, Papa takes up the trail, leading him through a dizzying maze of Hungarian thugs, the CIA, FBI, Fidel and Che, horny coeds, amorous spies, and the mob (why not), during which he's threatened, chased, followed, kidnapped, and shot at--and that's nothing compared to what Mary wants to do to him! Atkinson knows his subject well but has come neither to praise nor bury Hemingway, who is fat, stubborn, violent, tough, crafty, and alcoholic (he sucks down enough booze to float navies), but has a sense of friendship and justice. With equal doses of mystery and espionage, the story also is presented with great humor. Hemingway Deadlights is a tasty cocktail of suspense, sex, laughs, and literature. Though Hemingway didn't do these things, he damn well should have. Mystery Readers will love it.--Mike Rogers, LJX/LJ
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