We never talked about Hemingway's 1956 safari. True at First Light didn't do much for me. Seemed he worked to hard to make a story out of that trip, but I wished he'd made it a narrative.
Well, as a fellow Hemingway aficionado, I have to say that I don't consider TAFL a Hemingway book. It was partially written shortly after the 1953-54 safari, then put aside while he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, then permanently put away shortly after that. Hem's health problems ruined him, from a writing standpoint, at that time and he never picked the manuscript up again.
His son Patrick, who was neither a writer nor a professional editor, then "edited" the manuscript and published it. It was a mess.
I bought the book when it was first published it and read it several times over. It seemed to me at the time that the passages/parts that were true to Hemingway's writing style and manner were very good, but they were mixed up willy-nilly with the nonsense that Patrick thought made a good tale. If you excerpt out that junk, you come up with a short but pretty good novella.
God save us from the well-intentioned editorial efforts of great writers' offspring...
