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Hemingway's
by Craig Boreth
Back to Literatour index page.
The Hemingway Bookstore: Order Hemingway's books from amazon.com. Ernest Hemingway Timeline The Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway's birthplace Banned Hemingway Books: The history of which ones were banned, and why. The Papa Page: Biography, photo album, quotes and links, chronicling his life from first breath to last.
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PART ONE: ITINERARY "Oh Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so."
Not five minutes after returning from Madrid, the lilt of that ethereal dialogue is bullied away by the drone of the heartless customs guy who confiscates my semi-harmless 4 lb. Pamplonese chorizo, and I am in terror, faced with the arduous task of explaining not only to myself, but to anyone out there who may be in the least bit curious, why this brief trip along a literary road, paved without ornament 70 years prior, altered my frame, outlook, way of life and everything. So here I now stand, meatless in America, returned form the lands of "The Sun Also Rises," with a story I'm going to try like hell to tell.
The itinerary reads like a hedonist's spring break: A drinking tour of Paris; hiking and fishing the Pyrenees; surviving the madness of the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona; inhaling the tapas lifestyle in San Sebastián; and partying through the hot night in Madrid. Visiting any one of these is a drama; but weave them in a crafted narrative flow, replete with conflict and climax, and you have an adventure of truly, well, Hemingway-esque proportions.
Add the evocative Hemingway style, and not only are you on the trip of a lifetime, but you wax nostalgic for your last visit in the summer of '25. E.L. Doctorow wrote, "When writing anything, [Hemingway] would construct the sentences so as to produce an emotion not by claiming it but by rendering precisely the experience to cause it." It is the "experience" you get when reading Hemingway that imparts each morning on the road, each spray of mountain wine, each aroma of livestock and clay, with a deliciously tangible sense of déjà vu. Shall we indulge?
PRACTICAL TIPS FOR THE TRAVELER: Razor-witted curmudgeon Paul Fussel described travel (as opposed to tourism) as "a quest for a new kind of strenuousness ... a laborious adventure amidst strange evil as well as strange good." With that in mind, I have only two rules for your journey: 1. No Youth Hostels. 2. Lay off the camera a bit.
Craig Boreth is the author of "Run With the Bulls: The Adventurer's Guide to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises." Visit his Web site for more information, or to order the book. Illustration by Federico Jordan, a freelance illustrator based in Mexico. © 1996 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Coming Next Week: "The Casablanca Literatour"
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