Green Hills of Africa

The safari was Pauline's uncle's money and a boyhood dream made good: Kenya and Tanganyika at the end of 1933, with the white hunter Philip Percival — the model for the book's Pop — presiding. The narrative compresses the trip to its final month and one increasingly comic obsession: the greater kudu, whose spiral horns keep not appearing while a companion the book calls Karl, hunting apart, hauls in trophy after effortless trophy. Hemingway renders his own envy with an honesty few memoirists risk — the great competitor, out-lucked in the field, taking his own temperature hourly.

The experiment announced in the foreword — could truth, shaped, stand against fiction? — divided critics then and still does; the consensus took the book as a lesser thing between masterpieces, while its country descriptions stand with anything he wrote. What everyone kept is the talk: riverbank and campfire seminars with an Austrian expatriate named Kandisky and with Pop, on courage, on why American writers are destroyed — money, critics, the loss of nerve — and on the canon, settled in one swing: Twain over everybody, Huckleberry Finn the source. The safari also seeded the two great African stories, 'Snows' and 'Macomber,' written in its afterglow — fiction, as if in answer to the experiment, winning the argument.

The last month of the safari, told in four movements — pursuit remembered, pursuit failing, pursuit as pleasure, pursuit rewarded. The quarry is the greater kudu; the antagonist is time (the rains coming north) and Karl, the companion whose luck is a running wound. Around the stalking: the Wanderobo and Masai guides rendered individually, Pop's professional serenity, P.O.M. — Pauline, 'Poor Old Mama' — keeping score, and the land itself, which Hemingway writes with more open love than any character on the shelf.

Braided through: the seminars. Kandisky the Austrian wants literary talk in the middle of Africa and gets the famous canon-clearing; the campfire sessions take up the destruction of American writers with names named. The hunt ends as hunts end — some horns on the truck, some in the next valley — and the book closes on the shore of a different sea, the experiment complete, the argument left open on purpose.