A mixed bag if really nice and rotten. I have a complicated relationship with Hemingway. ( )

Great writer - but just not for me. ( )

This is the single short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" as narrated by actor Charlton Heston on a 1-CD edition reissued by Harper Audio in 2008. The original recording was released as a Caedmon Audio Cassette in 1989. The story itself first appeared in Esquire Magazine in 1936 and in the anthology "The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Short Stories" in 1938 and many later short story collections.

I've previously enjoyed the Ernest Hemingway short stories as narrated by Stacy Keach in the Scribner's audiobook editions and have thought of Keach as having the perfect voice for Hemingway's writing with its slight edge of outlaw & noir swagger. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Heston's reading was just as fitting to this tale of a writer dying of a gangrenous wound while regretfully reminiscing about his life experiences that he never got around to writing about and alternatively cursing his rich wife whom he now feels had led him away from a simpler existence. The parallels with the real-life Hemingway and his 1933-34 African safari with 2nd wife Pauline Pfeiffer are cringeworthy and foreshadow what Hemingway would later write in "A Moveable Feast" (esp. in "The Pilot Fish and the Rich" section in the restored edition).

In a famous* section of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" the proxy Hemingway vows to never write about "the rich" but certainly did as soon as 1937's "To Have and Have Not", so there is still a wide separation between the proxy and real-life. None of the other story fragments mentioned made it into longer fiction though.

*Hemingway had to remove "Scott Fitzgerald" from the original text and replace it with a writer named "Julian" after Fitzgerald himself protested the section:"The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him." ( )

Hemingway produces a beautiful set of character sketches in this book - I love is prose and while some of the characters in these stories are not likeable the writing makes the effort worthwhile. ( )

http://boekenwijs.blogspot.com/2008/06/de-sneeuw-van-de-kilimandzjaro.html ( )