Hired, fired, bumped and dumped, she always lands right-side up, and her luck still holds when she meets and marries Jay Masters, the love of her life. Poles apart in personality, they find their differences only add zest to their wild and wonderful life together.
Her readers are taken on a ride that will leave them chuckling with laughter, and choking with tears, only to be buoyed up again by an indomitable spirit that refuses to go down without a fight.
It's a story that holds the reader from the very first page to the very last line...and beyond.
A kind of no-nonsense style characterizes Richard Teleky's storytelling. There is no lingering over the feelings sustained through hardship or tragedy. The riveting sorrows of Rosie Kamin's life are held up like flash cards: her parents' internment in Auschwitz, where her father was killed; her mother's resolute silence and eventual suicide in Pittsburgh, where she'd gone to raise her two daughters. Haunted by the suicide and her mother's unrevealed life in the concentration camp, Rosie nonetheless falls into the vicious lethargy of taking care of her obtuse, demanding stepfather. Finally breaking the spell, she heads off for Paris, there to carry on her family legacy of denial and escapism for another 20 years.
This is a novel about breaking the spell of secrets and denial. Rosie remains as disconnected in Paris and adrift in her life, even at the age of 40, as she was after graduating from college in the U.S. The reappearance of Benyoub, however, forces her to begin to integrate her past sorrow and to commit to a journey, with her eccentric sister, of a reconciliation with the past.
The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin is full of unusual characters, tersely drawn, and Teleky's minimalist style builds satisfyingly toward Rosie's self-realization. But occasionally the parading of crises unattended by reflection, varying pitch, or emotion ("In the spring of her graduating year, six months after Elza's funeral, Rosie was raped") annoys. In this regard, the novel, largely unfelt, does not extract sympathy from the reader. --Hollis Giammatteo
Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer in the year of the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
A blend of autobiography and fiction, the book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary, pursues the great black-maned lion that has become her obsession. Spicing his depictions of human longings with sharp humor, Hemingway captures the excitement of big-game hunting and the unparalleled beauty of the scenery -- the green plains covered with gray mist, zebra and gazelle traversing the horizon, cool dark nights broken by the sounds of the hyena's cry.
As the group at camp help Mary track her prize, she and Ernest suffer the "incalculable casualties of marriage," and their attempts to love each other well are marred by cruelty, competition and infidelity. Ernest has become involved with Debba, an African girl whom he supposedly plans to take as a second bride. Increasingly enchanted by the local African community, he struggles between the attraction of these two women and the wildly different cultures they represent.
In True at First Light, Hemingway also chronicles his exploits -- sometimes hilarious and sometimes poignant -- among the African men with whom he has become very close, reminisces about encounters with other writers and his days in Paris and Spain and satirizes, among other things, the role of organized religion in Africa. He also muses on the act of writing itself and the author's role in determining the truth. What is fact and what is fiction? This is a question that was posed by Hemingway's readers throughout his career and is one of his principal subjects here.
Equally adept at evoking the singular textures of the landscape, the thrill of the hunt and the complexities of married life, Hemingway weaves a tale that is rich in laughter, beauty and profound insight. True at First Light is an extraordinary publishing event -- a breathtaking final work from one of this nation's most beloved and important writers.
In True at First Light the glory days of the "great white hunters" are over and the Mau Mau rebellion is violently dislodging European farmers from Kenya's arable lands. But to the African gun bearers, drivers, and game scouts who run his safari in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, Hemingway remains a lordly figure--almost a god. Two parallel quests propel the narrative: Mary, Hemingway's fourth and last wife, doggedly stalks an enormous black-maned lion that she is determined to kill by Christmas, while Hemingway becomes increasingly obsessed with Debba, a beautiful young African woman. What makes the novel especially strange and compelling is that Mary knows all about Debba and accepts her as a "supplementary wife," even as she loses no opportunity to rake her husband over the coals for his drinking, lack of discipline in camp, and condescending protectiveness.
As usual with Hemingway, atmosphere and attitude are far more important than plot. Mary at one point berates her husband as a "conscience-ridden murderer," but this is precisely the moral stance that gives the hunting scenes their tension and beauty. "I was happy that before he died he had lain on the high yellow rounded mound with his tail down," Hemingway writes of "Mary's lion," "and his great paws comfortable before him and looked off across his country to the blue forest and the high white snows of the big Mountain."
Passages like these--and there are many of them--redeem the book's rambling structure and occasional lapses into self-indulgent posturing. Joan Didion dismissed True at First Light in The New Yorker as "words set down but not yet written," but this fails to acknowledge the power of these words. The value of True at First Light lies in its candor, its nakedness: it provides a rare opportunity to watch a master working his way toward art. --David Laskin
The Historical Essay by Alexander Cowie, which follows the texts, discusses the facts surrounding the composition, publication, and reception of both works and their place in America's literary history, and the Textual Essay by S.W. Reid discusses the copy-texts for the present edition, the transmission of the texts, and the editorial decisions that have been based on these considerations. Also appended are photographs of the notebook pages containing Brown's "Outline" of Wieland, along with our transcription of it. Moreover, as the first in a series of volumes, this volume offers, as well, a note on the principles and procedures guiding the editing of all works in the Bicentennial Edition.
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