Content area
Full Text
Larry Grimes and Bickford Sylvester (eds.) (2014). Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. xviii+383pp. ISBN: 978-160635181-9, US$65.
Larry Grimes introduces Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban works (2014) by referring to the book as a "first expedition" into the unchartered waters of the life of American author and journalist Ernest Hemingway on the Caribbean island he called home from 1939-1960. Grimes' assertion is ironically refuted by valuable bibliographies by Kelli A. Larson and Ned Quevedo Arnaíz within the book itself, which document robust attempts by both Cuban and American scholars since the 1970s (and presumably much earlier) to analyze and assess Hemingway's life and work in Cuba. Nevertheless, Grimes' compilation of a relatively understudied period in Ernest Hemingway's life is still meritorious. A rather ragtag mix of personal memoir, interviews, book excerpts, criticism, and bibliography makes the book not necessarily the most unilateral or linear of texts to date, but rather an attempt to bring together a wide range of voices regarding Hemingway's life in Cuba. As a result, the collection serves as a cross-section of work by both Cuban and American writers on how Cuba influenced Hemingway's writing.
One way in which the book explores this influence is by including essays that reveal Cuba as a site of experimentation with modernist art forms. As James Nagel's "Hemingway's Impressionist Islands" suggests, Hemingway found in Cuba a template for exploring Parisian impressionism but also "to bring alive, in an immediate, tactile way, the world Hudson lives in and his relation to it" (p. 252). At another point in the book, Grimes points to the influence that Cuba's Afro-Cuban religious syncretism had on Hemingway's work. As Grimes writes, the island's history as a slave colony continues to live on in a rich Afro-Cuban folklore and a syncretic religion called Santería, which Hemingway himself not only practised but incorporated into his fiction. As Grimes asserts,...