I have immersed myself many times in the biography of one of my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway. He was a particularly complex figure whose life has deeply moved me—from his father’s suicide to his career as a journalist and then as a writer, from his relationship to war and death to bullfighting, his ambiguous ties to politics, his involvement with communism alongside his friend Dos Passos, his love for the republic and his aversion to fascism during the Spanish Civil War, his approach to love with the women in his life, his descriptions of the idyllic landscapes of Havana, and his very distinctive style of writing.
In this book, “Une drôle de traversée”—itself an excerpt from the book “En avoir ou pas” or, in English, “To Have and Have Not”—which particularly struck me because of its brevity—he recounts the adventure of Harry Morgan, an amateur smuggler who rents out his fishing skills to men seeking thrills and who, through a series of twists and turns, meets Mr. Sing, a Chinese smuggler of illegal immigrants, who makes him a strange proposal.
The strength of this book lies in its accurate depiction of events—the ruggedness of the fishing rod during the swordfish hunt, life in this small coastal town in Cuba, the bars, and above all, the quality of the character development. Few books have left such a lasting impression on me in so few pages, but this one is among them, and I recommend it to anyone who has the chance to read it (you won’t regret it!).
