Hemingway's Spain [Inscribed and Signed by the Photographer]

A photo-essay celebration of Spain as Hemingway eulogized and mythologized it. The photographs, in both color and b&w, number more than a hundred. Many date from Hemingway's last visit to Spain in 1960. Others are historical photographs from his earlier days in Spain. The photographs are accompanied by excerpts from Hemingway's work, as well as a text describing his relationship with Spain. See previous entry. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

"With Hemingway, if you didn't like Spain there wasn't much else he wanted to talk to you about," writes Conrad ( Matador ), and though it is undoubtedly odd to tell of Hemingway's fascination with things Spanish in a coffee-table "lifestyle" book, this glossy bastardization of roughshod machismo is, considering the limits of the genre, reasonably informative. We learn a smidgen of bullfighting and Spanish history, as well as Hemingway's attachment to each. But the novelist's well-known enthusiasm for violence is rarely evident in Dean's overly luscious pictures. The photographer's portraits and landscapes demurely avoid the rituals of death to champion the cause of a more wholesome national vitality. Commercial and ploddingly banal, even in shots of the rough-and-tumble of man and bull, Conrad and Dean's version of the Iberian peninsula has little bearing on Hemingway's.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This volume is more of a photographic salute to bullfighting than to Hemingway. After a condensed introduction on his life as it related to Spain, don Ernesto's persona is only exhibited in a few snapshots and pop-out quotes from his books. The many photographs of Spain (50 color, 75 black and white) are nice but consist mainly of still lifes of the countryside or action shots of bullfights. This adds nothing new to Hemingway lore and is little more than a commercialization of his name. For a better photographic remembrance go with A.E. Hotchner's Hemingway and His World ( LJ 12/15/89).
- Michael Rogers, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.