描述
开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780345467348
A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irish
reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway.
The interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended something
had clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie devoted her
life to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them through
beloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them during
the tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary,
but in reality a confidante and sharer of the great man’s secrets
and sorrows, Valerie literally came of age in the company of one of
the greatest literary lions of the twentieth century.
Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway herself
when she married the writer’s estranged son Gregory. Now, at last,
she tells the story of the incredible years she spent with this
extravagantly talented and tragically doomed family.
In prose of brilliant clarity and stinging candor, Valerie evokes
the magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway’s last years. Swept up
in the wild revelry that always exploded around Hemingway, Valerie
found herself dancing in the streets of Pamplona, cheering
bullfighters at Valencia, careening around hairpin turns in
Provence, and savoring the panorama of Paris from her attic room in
the Ritz. But it was only when Hemingway threatened to commit
suicide if she left that she realized how troubled the aging writer
was–and how dependent he had become on her.
In Cuba, Valerie spent idyllic days and nights typing the final
draft of A Moveable Feast, even as Castro’s revolution closed in.
After Hemingway shot himself, Valerie returned to Cuba with his
widow, Mary, to sort through thousands of manu* pages and
smuggle out priceless works of art. It was at Ernest’s funeral that
Valerie, then a researcher for Newsweek, met Hemingway’s son
Gregory–and again a chance encounter drastically altered the course
of her life. Their twenty-one-year marriage finally unraveled as
Valerie helplessly watched her husband succumb to the demons that
had plagued him since childhood.
From lunches with Orson Welles to midnight serenades by
mysterious troubadours, from a rooftop encounter with Castro to
numbing hospital vigils, Valerie Hemingway played an intimate,
indispensable role in the lives of two generations of Hemingways.
This memoir, by turns luminous, enthralling, and devastating, is
the account of what she enjoyed, and what she endured, during her
astonishing years of living as a Hemingway.
From the Hardcover edition.
“It is one of the best books on Hemingway that I have read,
and it has material to be found nowhere else on Ernest, Mary, and
Greg Hemingway.”
–NORMAN MAILER
“Valerie Hemingway is, with Hemingway’s only surviving son, the
last witness to have a precious, intimate knowledge of the family.
Her account of Ernest’s last years and of the tragic aftermath of
his suicide is absolutely riveting: essential reading for anyone
interested in the curse of fame.”
–JEFFREY MEYERS, author of Hemingway: A Biography
“This is the best, and best written, of all the reminiscences of
Ernest Hemingway, in part because its adventurous author, Valerie
Hemingway, is such an absorbing character herself. For once, the
great artist, the hero, and the fool seem to be the same person;
and the long list of fascinating people in his train are seen with
rare frankness.”
–TOM MCGUANE
“Running with the Bulls is hot to the touch. I was not a little
dumbfounded that Valerie Hemingway endured and survived the events
of her life to write this improbably skillful memoir that
frequently made me wish to climb a mountain and sit on a friendly
glacier. The author’s life with the Hemingways is utterly
compelling, and we must praise her for her gifts in giving us the
most lucid look yet written at this haunted family.”
–JIM HARRISON
“This is a startling, complicated book . . . fresh, trenchant and
intimate and revealing, yet sweet-spirited . . . told by a woman
with a wonderful voice of her own.”
–DAVID QUAMMEN
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