A chance meeting in
a bar in Key West in 1936 began a friendship and ultimately marriage
between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. Martha was a novice
writer hoping to become famous. She couldn’t help being drawn to
the charismatic Hemingway. Their friendship progressed through phone
calls until Ernest announced his intention to go to Spain as a war
correspondent.
Martha couldn’t
resist the call of adventure. She followed Hemingway to Spain with
fifty dollars and a backpack. Martha caught up with Hemingway in
Madrid. She still saw him as a friend, but the attraction was strong
and soon they were lovers. Being the partner of a famous man wasn’t
easy for Martha, an independent woman who wanted her own career.
They married in 1940
and had happy years writing in Havana. Then Hemingway’s most famous
book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was published, and Martha found
herself eclipsed by his fame. They struggled for awhile, but the
marriage eventually ended in divorce and Martha went on to be a
famous war correspondent.
This is a thoroughly
engrossing book. I thought the author did an excellent job portraying
two strong characters each striving for their own success, but trying
to stay together. The book is fiction, but so well done that you can
feel the tension of real people.
I did have trouble
with some of the author’s descriptions. She seemed to be trying too
hard to find unusual ways to describe what Martha was seeing. The
descriptions were sometimes so unusual that they broke the flow of
the story while I tried to figure out what she was trying to show.
On the whole, this
is a very good book. If you enjoy fiction based on the lives of real
people, I think you’ll enjoy this one.
I received this book
from Net Galley for this review.
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