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"The bestselling author of The Paris Wife returns to the subject of Ernest Hemingway in a novel about his passionate, stormy marriage to Martha Gellhorn--a fiercely independent, ambitious young woman who would become one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It's the adventure she's been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly--and uncontrollably--falling in love with Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming a legend. In the shadow of the impending Second World War, and set against the turbulent backdrops of Madrid and Cuba, Martha and Ernest's relationship and their professional careers ignite. But when Ernest publishes the biggest literary success of his career, For Whom the Bell Tolls, they are no longer equals, and Martha must make a choice: surrender to the confining demands of being a famous man's wife or risk losing Ernest by forging a path as her own woman and writer. It is a dilemma that could force her to break his heart, and hers. Heralded by Ann Patchett as "the new star of historical fiction," Paula McLain brings Gellhorn's story richly to life and captures her as a heroine for the ages: a woman who will risk absolutely everything to find her own voice"--… (meer)
In “ Live and Ruin” I found it difficult to like either Martha Gelhorn or Ernest Hemingway . They both came across as self centered, egotistical, and childish. It came as no surprise their marriage was doomed. The risks Marty took as a war correspondent seemed selfish in this novel. As she was an actual person I don’t know what her life was really like but in this book I didn’t really like Martha. ( )
Paula McLain has done it again and perhaps even exceeded [b:The Paris Wife|8683812|The Paris Wife|Paula McLain|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320545874l/8683812._SX50_.jpg|13556031] in her continuing look at the loves and marriages of Ernest Hemingway. How fascinating to know that Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was a writer and journalist in her own right and owed little if anything to the fame of her famous husband.
What an amazing woman Marty Gellhorn was! She did things as a war journalist that would have struck fear into the hearts of most men, and she did them right through into her eighties. McLain made me believe in Gellhorn completely and she painted what seemed a very realistic portrait of Hemingway at this stage in his life. Talk about your complex men.
Even knowing a bit about Hemingway's life and personality, and despite also knowing the outcome of this "love story", I found the story riveting. I felt the tension, the love, the confusion, and Marty's desire to maintain herself and not be lost in the whirlwind of a larger than life figure like Hemingway. I also found it easy to understand how he pulled at her and what made her so vulnerable to him.
The last bit of heaven for me was knowing what was occuring in Hemingway's life as he produced what I consider to be his greatest novel, [b:For Whom the Bell Tolls|46170|For Whom the Bell Tolls|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492591524l/46170._SY75_.jpg|2252079]. I have now promised myself a re-read--after all, I want to see how much of Marty Gellhorn made its way into the character of Maria. ( )
I just want to say before I review LOVE AND RUIN by Paula McLain that I read CIRCLING THE SUN by the author a couple of years ago and it's one of those books that I fell in love with and I still remember how great the reading experience was. I have yet to read THE PARIS WIFE (it stands and looks accusingly at me on a shelf at home), but I hope to get to it one day.
READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW OVER AT FRESH FICTION!( )
This book made me want to read Hemingway's biography in full!... Having read McLain's "The Paris Wife", about Hemingway's first wife, and his own book about that period "A Movable Feast", and now this one - I feel like I need to connect the dots.
It goes without saying here that the relationship between Martha Gellhorn (later to become a renowned war correspondent) and Hemingway, was a tumultuous one. Two very strong personalities, loving but clashing at times, at times suffocating each other, only to find life unbearable when apart. This was the third marriage for Hemingway (out of 4) , and not a long one. Just like McLain did in "The Paris Wife", she clearly has done a ton of research here as well.
Truly passionate about her writing, Martha Gellhorn struggled with acknowledgement of her fiction - ups and downs there, but finally getting good reviews; she reported within the country as well as abroad; she described Depression while reporting on it within the country as "darker things than I ever imagined" .
Super intense images of war in Spain where she followed Hemingway to report on the war, and shuddering images of Hitler's Germany... As I was reading about this, it was surreal - as the invasion of Ukraine just started. Her description was too close to home - in so many ways... During all this, Hemingway described her "the bravest woman alive"...
As for Hemingway himself, he comes through as a complicated man... Martha Gellhorn explains him to her mother, her lifetime confidante, like this: "... you're around someone like him, a fiery sort of person, a genius, really, and then you're not. Well, it leaves a hole, doesn't it?" ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? -Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls
Opdracht
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
For Julie Barer
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Near dawn on July 13, 1936, as three assassins scaled a high garden wall in Tenerife hoping to catch the band of armed guards unaware, I was asleep in a tiny room in Stuttgart, waiting for my life to begin.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
It was all so shocking and so absolutely wrong. And yet you could almost pretend it wasn't happening by going on with your life and thinking it had nothing to do with you.
How naive and hopeless the idea of pacifism seemed when the streets were full of brownshirts.
It was a beautiful crusade, and though I wasn't immediately sure how I would find a role for myself, later I thought only this: It may be the luckiest and purest thing of all to see time sharpen to a single point. To feel the world rise up and shake you hard, insisting that you rise, too, somehow. Some way. That you come awake and stretch, painfully. That you change, completely and irrevocably—with whatever means are at your disposal—into the person you were always meant to be.
For better or worse I was born a traveler, wanting to go everywhere and see everything.
It seemed imperative not only to be on the move, and feeling things, but also to be my own person, and to live my own life, and not anyone else's.
I felt very small, suddenly, and that there were two of me, the girl I was and the one he wished he could put in her place.
And then late in the day, one of the surgeons walked toward us carrying his cloth cap in his hands, and I thought I would rather step out of my own skin than hear what he had to say.
"You're collecting people because you need their opinion about you. It's not pretty to watch."
On the train pushed, and when we finally arrived at Penn Station, I stepped out into the cold afternoon air that was cleaner and colder than anything in St. Louis, because it allowed for more.
Out of the city, Florida's orange-juice-colored sun fattened, and the heat grew wonderfully heavy. A single tired road stretched south through swamp and marsh flats, like an enormous python digesting the slow line of cars and wagons one by one. The twisted mangrove and saw-grass marshes released a salty, earthy living smell, while roadside signs offered pan-ready turtles and bonefish, and ominous biblical quotes.
The entire town would have fit in an unwashed teacup, and was hotter than anything and falling apart. The dusty streets were overrun with chickens, ready to riot over breadcrumbs or pebbles, it didn't seem to matter which.
Overhead, the blades of the fan clipped round like a slow-breathing animal. Beyond the open door two seagulls harassed each other, wrestling over a black mussel shell.
"I was born in the Middle West," he told her. "Near Chicago. It always looks better to me from a distance—the country as well as the people."
His eyes cut sideways at me in the mirror, and my pulse quickened. It was something to have his attention, even briefly. Like a bright light passing my way before moving on. But there was also a feeling that he really saw me, and understood how my mind worked. It didn't make any sense, as we'd just met—but he was a brilliant painter of people in his work, and I believed that he probably did see all kinds of things, perhaps without even trying.
I wanted to hold the moment still as long as possible, but finally there was nothing to do but say good night one last time.
The sky drooped heavily, pushing chimney smoke down until it thickened the air, clinging to the houses and lampposts.
"What does one need for a war, anyway?" I asked my mother. "Courage, I suppose. But I'd throw a cake of soap in there, too. And warm socks."
The trees were glazed with ice. Everything seemed to be made of crystal.
I could simply look at everything and absorb it, jostled by the great tires shuddering along the road, while sunlight palmed the top of my head, and lightly brushed the tips of my eyelashes. This was a country wracked by war and chaos, but already I knew that it wouldn't take much at all for me to love it.
Back in motion we passed buildings smashed and ransacked, storefronts covered with plastic sheeting and also cardboard. We drove slowly to avoid the shell holes and because it was so dark. It was strange to be in a place that was so black and ravaged, as if the city were dead and this place were its ghost. I had never been fearful as a child, but if I had been, this would have been the stuff of my nightmares.
Here I was at war, where anything could happen at any moment. Nothing could have felt stranger or sharper or more sobering.
"This is war after all," Ernest said when he saw my expression. "If they spared the booze, everything would go to hell quick."
I had a bed and a bureau and a radiator and a small bathroom, the kind where you have to fold yourself up into a handkerchief to properly wash.
"Freedom has only ever been paid for with lives," Tom said. "It's always the same story. We just happen to have a front-row seat this time."
The smoking and the talking and the whiskey were all part of the fabric of the evening, the way time slid forward.
We passed a six-story building that was open to the street, its facade ripped cleanly away. There was something almost vulgar in it, how you could look all the way through to the china cabinets and beds and wing chairs and bathtubs, the furniture of any life rattled apart and suspended. Some of the apartments seemed untouched except for the small matter of having no front wall—like some abandoned life-size dollhouse you could reach into and rearrange to suit yourself.
The interesting thing about chaos is that it provides perfect privacy.
"I can be an awfully good friend to you if you let me." "If I didn't know better, I'd think I was being ditched." His tone changed to acid. "It's been a while, but I think I remember the feeling." "Stop it. That's the last thing I want. Aren't you listening?" "I'm listening." His look was level, skewering. "I've got plenty of friends."
Tomorrow he knows he'll hear the number of casualties on both sides, strict accounting being one of the things you do in a war to keep you from thinking about the actual people who have fallen.
There was what you meant to do and what you had to do. There was who you thought you were, and who you became on a night like this, in Madrid, in the dark chaos of the street, following your feet where they needed to go.
After three weeks I felt I'd been in Madrid for years, and also that I never wanted to leave. I'd never experienced such intensity, ever. It was like living with my heart constantly in my throat.
the children who went to school in any building that would have them, walking past sprinkled trails of human blood to get there, and stopping sometimes to dig for souvenir shells to barter with one another, the way children in St. Louis did with marbles and baseball cards.
The children scattered, thrown like coins.
The lyddite smoke floated past, like lace made of poison.
They had just reached the center of the square when the air shredded. The shell whined past and burst into countless fragments, like pieces of the sun. Faster than anyone could see, faster than thought, one pierced the boy's throat. He crumpled, his hand still in hers, while shells kept falling all around, one every few seconds.
It was rash, what we were doing. We would both probably regret it, but I didn't want to think of that, or anything else for now. Not guilt, and not Pauline. Not how much time we had left in Spain, or what we would say or feel in the future. Maybe the future didn't even exist. That was more than possible. War made its own rules, after all, and we could only guess at them.
And as I let myself tumble to the floor with him, what I felt more than anything was terribly lost. What I wanted more than anything—anything—was to be found.
In the distance, a blur of white stucco smoked. It was a farmhouse, burning. High above, in a sky flat as ironed cotton, a vulture spun one long slow circle that sent a tingling up the back of my neck.
All the men we met—or they were boys, really, most of them—seemed to look at me with astonishment, as if a wedding cake had turned up, or a gazelle.
Many of the soldiers held rifles at the ready. Others stood beside theirs, or sometimes lay with their guns like sleeping dogs at their sides.
He was tall and slender with a shock of blond hair that reminded me of just-shorn fields.
When courage failed them, they would find a way to stand their ground anyway and fight on spirit alone. They had grit rather than bravery.
There was no moon, and the hillside and the pines were shrouded in heavy blackness, as if curtains had been pulled down from some great height.
I kissed him again, not wanting to stop and also wishing futilely that this moment and everything between us could be finished already. The affair begun and ended, the damage done and the repairs under way, my battered heart on the mend. Because he would break my heart. I already knew that if nothing else.
We had all the time in the world to make a terrible mistake.
My nerves seemed to hover exposed around me like a raw kind of halo. I was being turned inside out, and whether it was the war or Spain or Ernest that was doing it, how did that matter? Maybe there wasn't any difference at all between them anyway.
On the narrow streets, shelling had loosed the houses from their stone moorings. They listed and tipped toward one another.
In the center of the road, I saw a heavy black sewing machine on its side, as if it had crawled out into the street to die.
The night was so still I could hear the blood tunneling through my body, the stopping and starting of each breath.
Time would have its way with everything, because that's what had always happened and always would, out into infinity.
Lecturing was the loneliest sort of business, I soon discovered.
I couldn't stop feeling desperate and hysterical, but my audiences only nodded at everything, tucking my warnings into their handbags.
"It's always hard to lose anything," I said.
There was a coarse beauty in the disintegrating seawall of the Malecon and the weathered strings of trawling nets, and in the crumbling old buildings along the bay in shades of melting ice cream.
I couldn't say why exactly, but I had an instinct that something wonderful lay just under the surface, only lightly sleeping, like a kingdom cursed by a witch and waiting not for a prince but for me.
Time was different. Each day seemed charged and priceless now. Who knew how many years or even months anyone had left to live simply, just as they chose, with all this violence and struggle, whole countries crumbling under hate.
Once the interior of the house had been tackled, the plaster walls repaired and painted, the windows replaced, the curtains mended, I scrubbed floors with manic energy, fixing new paper to the kitchen shelves and drawers, attacking cobwebs with a stiff Cuban straw broom, while some part of me stood to one side, dizzy with fear and doubt and uncertainty—the vertigo of extreme transformation.
I tossed and turned, and woke at dawn feeling thick and morose, a dark mood loitering like storm clouds.
I snapped a blank page into the roller, sending a sharp report echoing through the house. The page was snowy white. It still held all of its secrets.
Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike.
Loss happened the way the tide did, again and again, washing the white sand flat.
I pushed my feet deeply into the cool sand and watched the water moving over the breakers, each one like a seam of pearly blue that turned over and over before it spilled open.
It was dim in the room, with the light from the lamps only stretching so far.
I found my shoes somehow and stumbled down the flights of stairs and outside onto the cold street where everyone was staring up into the heavy gray sky. The humming was like the noise of a wasp growing louder and louder until I could feel it under my feet.
In the hotel, we couldn't hear anything for the roaring. I lunged under a marble table in the restaurant, hugging my knees as the floor shook convulsively. Everything rocked and shuddered with the explosions. The windows concussed. I felt my teeth jarring and clacking as the bombs fell. The attack lasted one minute, the longest single minute of my life.
The avenue was an ocean of bright glass. Four large apartment buildings had collapsed as if made only of paper-mache, or of air. A bus had been forced over onto its side like a downed bull elephant.
The people didn't seem frightened to me. They had a frozen resolve that seemed as much a part of Finland as the snow and the dark.
We were both playing at optimism, at resilience. At hope. But how else could anyone get through such a thing?
The guide's name was Viskey, a young lieutenant so sharply and cleanly turned out he could have been carved from a bar of soap.
"No one will win," he said simply. "This is war, after all."
Time began to swing like a hammock as the boys settled into their vacation.
The world was in the hands of madmen, and Roosevelt still wouldn't act.
There was acid in his voice. I felt a warning sensation, a prickling at the back of my neck, and swallowed the words I should have said. I felt them for a long time after, like small burning stones.
Would I be as thrilled by the idea of going off to war if I didn't have Ernest and the Finca waiting for me? And would I be truly content here if I couldn't also go away sometimes and do my work?
The British Lancasters, which were among the heaviest bombers in the war, flew in and out of the airfield a dozen at a time, the air so full of vibration when they did you'd think you were going to shake apart or go a little mad.
Then they suited up, climbing into those great hulking terrible birds to bring death on the wing.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
"The bestselling author of The Paris Wife returns to the subject of Ernest Hemingway in a novel about his passionate, stormy marriage to Martha Gellhorn--a fiercely independent, ambitious young woman who would become one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It's the adventure she's been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly--and uncontrollably--falling in love with Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming a legend. In the shadow of the impending Second World War, and set against the turbulent backdrops of Madrid and Cuba, Martha and Ernest's relationship and their professional careers ignite. But when Ernest publishes the biggest literary success of his career, For Whom the Bell Tolls, they are no longer equals, and Martha must make a choice: surrender to the confining demands of being a famous man's wife or risk losing Ernest by forging a path as her own woman and writer. It is a dilemma that could force her to break his heart, and hers. Heralded by Ann Patchett as "the new star of historical fiction," Paula McLain brings Gellhorn's story richly to life and captures her as a heroine for the ages: a woman who will risk absolutely everything to find her own voice"--
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