Review #133
This is the story of a famous family plagued by tragedy.
The author, grandson of Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway, and son of his youngest child, Gregory, investigates the similarities between these two paternal figures and seeks to find his place in their "strange tribe with a famous last name".
The book does much to complicate Ernest's image as a macho man, cataloguing both his dependence on women and his gender-bending proclivities. However, the true heart of the book is in exploring the Hemingways’ failure as parents and how the familial disposition toward manic-depression created a genetic "Hemingway curse". The author, having escaped the disease, paints his father and grandfather in blunt strokes as loving and generous men who had little understanding of their psychological disorder.
The most endearing and comprehensive portrait is of his father's struggles as a transvestite son of a "pillar of American manhood." (Gregory surgically became a woman and died of heart failure in a Miami women's jail in 2001.) When describing his own parents' early neglect (his mother was schizophrenic) and, later, his partial reconciliation with his father, the book focuses on the author's generation of Hemingways. But, mostly, the book is intent upon setting the record straight about Ernest, his youngest son and their similarities.
In his twenties, John moved to Italy to find his way and now lives with his wife and two children in Spain working as a writer and translator.
A very interesting book!
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