The Old Man and his archive.
Cuba recently made the first of thousands of digitized documents, photographs and books that belonged to writer Ernest Hemingway available to scholars after the items languished for decades in the basement of his home outside of Havana.
Most of the papers have never been published and will give new insight into the 21 years Hemingway spent at Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula, where he wrote some of his greatest works, said Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, director of Museo Ernest Hemingway.
Scholars “will be able to study important documents that shed light on the Cuban period of Hemingway, which was very important and not well known by his biographers,” she said.
The material includes more than 2,000 documents, including manuscripts of some of his works, letters, store receipts, 3,500 photographs and 9,000 books — some 2,000 of which Hemingway was known to have read because he made notes in the margins.
The documents included coded accounts by Hemingway of his exploits searching for German submarines off Cuba’s coast during World War II and letters about his love affair with Italian Countess Adriana Ivancich, believed to be the model for the heroine in his 1950 novel, “Across the River and Into the Trees.”
Scholars now have to go to Finca Vigia to see the archive, but soon the documents will also be available at the Hemingway collection in the John F. Kennedy presidential library in Boston.
uk.reuters.com
First
Lines
Fidali’s Way, by George Mastras
Nicholas Sunder should not have been surprised when he heard the knock on his hotel-room door. For Nick was not a man blessed with great luck. He had no choice but to open it, for whoever was in the hallway would have been told by Shahid, the receptionist, that he was in. He glanced at his watch, envisioning himself sitting anonymously on an eastbound minibus packed with raucous Pakistanis, and cursed himself for not leaving half an hour earlier. Shutting his eyes, he inhaled deeply to garner his wits. Then he opened the door.
Standing in the doorframe was a barrel of a man with a flat head perched atop a trunklike neck. His face, dark and pitted, was bisected by flaring mustaches, and punctuated with obsidian eyes. He wore the distinctive sky blue uniform of the Peshawar police.
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