Ernest Hemingway

May 28, 2018
Katakis (A Thousand Shards of Glass), the manager of Ernest Hemingway’s literary estate, has produced a slipshod collection of archival materials that still holds the power to delight. His stated aim is to remove the obscuring blur of mythology (“the story is far more nuanced and detailed than myth allows”), but the editing of the contents, drawn from the John F. Kennedy Library’s Hemingway Collection, is lacking. Most photographs have no dates, a large section of scanned ephemera that makes up the heart of the book has no explanatory captions, and the letters are sometimes given with no context for the recipient’s relationship to Hemingway, while the accompanying timeline feels like an assortment of facts picked randomly from an almanac (from 1951: “Greta Garbo gets U.S. citizenship”). By the end of the book, with the afterword by Séan Hemingway, the author’s grandson (“As well as anyone alive, I can attest to the richness and extraordinary nature of this national treasure”), the book feels most like an advertisement for the archive. As serious scholarship the volume doesn’t measure up, but Hemingway enthusiasts should find it enjoyable to page through.