Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

I hate leaving negative reviews and I feel like I'm being generous giving 2 stars. Honestly, this book is so dull. He supposedly lived this interesting life but I had to force myself to keep reading it in the hope that it improved... Does the author hate Hemmingway and that's why it is so boring? Who knows...

Apologies issues with the arc and I can’t download now so can’t leave a full review, what I read I thoroughly enjoyed and I’ll be buying this myself

Richard Bradford's new book about Ernest Hemingway has many predecessors but none equal it.
I like the fact that Bradford appears to have a love/hate relationship with Hemingway. So many biographers are content to idolize, rather than analyse their chosen subject. Bradford shows Hemingway with warts and all, ready to reassess his moments of literary genius whilst still able to call some of his later work literary masturbation.
Hemingway was, and still is a legend, but Bradford strips him naked as an inveterate liar, who invented as much in his own back story as in the fiction he published. Lucky Hemingway isn't still around to put on his boxing gloves and knock Bradford out, but perhaps he would relent and agree that this book is unmissable for his legion of fans.

As I’m a slow reader I tend to apply to NetGalley to advance review only books I think I’ll like. A couple of Hemingway novels were part of the background of an important summer in my younger life (also worryingly featuring The Ginger Man) and I’d often wondered what he was really like. I’m reviewing this as a generalist reader. It would be interesting to read academic reviews of this book given his fairly strong criticism of other biographers of Hemingway. The book has a lively and argumentative style throughout and is very entertaining and interesting. You definitely wouldn’t want Hemingway as a friend but I hoped deep down that he was a prisoner since a child of his insecurity/ need to embellish and knew it and cursed it inwardly. Otherwise he was just unpleasant. I will buy my own copy and look for clues. I usually include ratings for violence, swearing etc in my fiction reviews but these weren’t an issue here.

Some writers are lazy, arrogant, or in Richard Bradford’s case, both.

The book’s central premise is Hemingway was a self-deluding fantasist, unable to tell reality and the yarns he spun about himself apart. Hemingway, we are told, was ‘vindictive’, ‘self-aggrandising’, a ‘lout’, ‘ill-tempered’; an ‘adolescent in the body of a man’, ‘deranged’, ‘a contemptible worm’, ‘a deluded ingenue’, a ‘selfish opportunistic individual’ and a ‘perpetual fraud.’ The book feels less written so much as spat onto the page.

Few of Bradford’s points withstand scrutiny. Even when he is right, he is not terribly enlightening. He sounds pompous whenever he tries to sound profound. ‘It goes without saying’ he says, ‘that fiction belongs to a class of fakery that is uniquely its own.’ Why he bothers to say something that goes without saying is not stated. And there are no ‘classes’ of fakery. There is only fact and fiction and prose has no monopoly on the latter whatsoever. ‘Who knows? Certainly not Hemingway.’ Certainly not Bradford either, unless he actually has unlocked the secret of telepathy.

Bradford collects howlers the way a kid collects stickers. He prizes The Old Man and The Sea as ‘the least autobiographical’ of Hemingway’s fiction. A moment’s thought tells you otherwise. Santiago, like Hemingway, is a deep sea fisherman emerging from a spell of salao - ‘the worst form of unlucky’ - just as Hemingway emerged from the homicidal reviews of Across the River and into the Trees. As Hemingway did, he catches a marlin after a lengthy struggle, bringing the carcass to shore. Hemingway did this so often he used the carcass for bait. This was one fact I didn’t know. Bradford told me - earlier in this book.

Bradford also thinks Santiago, alone among Hemingway’s characters, is wholly made up. That’s right. Santiago, the ageing, blue-eyed, thin, gaunt fisherman from the Canary Islands bears not even the faintest resemblance to Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s elderly fisherman friend, who was blue-eyed, thin, gaunt, and from the Canary Islands. This is not even the worst blunder.

This is an idle, fatuous book, long on secondary sources, short on insight, finesse, originality and interest.

I found this a curiously one-note and rather unbalanced biography of Hemingway. Bradford's thesis seems to be that Hem was a pathological liar who couldn't tell the difference between real life and his fiction, that he 'perverted the truth so frequently and habitually that he all but erased his own existence' (loc.72). The language used is all around fantasies, self-delusion, escapist alternatives to reality, make-believe, illusions - most of which (with the exception of self-delusion) are also terms generally associated with fiction. The book tries to get around the issue like this: 'An author's success in reframing and disguising reality as fiction presupposes an ability to consciously differentiate between the two. For Hemingway the boundaries between life and writing were sometimes poorly defined.(loc90)' Hem, the book implies, is borderline psychotic and of questionable sanity. I'd have liked far more sourced evidence and close analysis than is provided here to accept this.

There *are*, undoubtedly, disturbing aspects to Hem: his machismo, the valorising of killing animals, the anti-antisemitism, his treatment of women - but this book seeks to erase any difference between books and author, seeing the former as an essential extension of the latter - if the man is a troubling personality then the books *must* have been misunderstood by generations of readers, critics and the Nobel panel is the implied argument here. They are manifestations of a diseased psyche which projects its own wannabe fantasies onto and into them.

Now, I'm all for iconoclasm and breaking with the valuations of the past, but this book didn't do a good job of convincing me of its thesis. There is less close close analysis than I'd expect, there are no footnotes/endnotes so that this isn't in scholarly dialogue with previous assessments of Hem. Where there is a reference to past work (and they are minimal), it's not given in a standard academic format or with internal consistency: so we have 'so, implies Lynn (p.23)', and, later, 'Kenneth Lynn (1987) refers to him as...' with no page reference. These are not anomalies: this would be sloppy in an undergraduate; from a literature professor, it's astonishing. The second half of the book where many of the references are to letters to, from, or about Hem, are better sourced.

More interesting are the claims that Hem knew nothing about Modernism and had no idea what the 1920s Paris circle of Pound, Fitzgerald, Stein, Eliot, Picasso et al. was about - that he simply fell in with them... until he fell out with them all again. The book is very strong on making Hem a malicious and cruel friend who never forgave a slight, especially a criticism of his writing, and who stored his resentment for up to ten years before unleashing it malevolently in his books. I simply don't know enough about Hem to know whether this is true; or whether it was the case, as is claimed here, that he regarded Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife, as 'his long-term financial safety net' (loc.1464).

This doesn't claim to be an analysis of the books (though the argument does depend on them) but it's disturbing to see such a wild misunderstanding of The Sun Also Rises as to be able to state 'Jake is the only character who is not sexually attracted to Brett Ashley' - um, really? Really?

Was Hem 'slightly deranged' (loc.1625)? Was he a 'fraud' (loc.2043) because he wrote stories about things that never happened to him or which he never did in real life? Did he want Martha Gellhorn in part because she was 'a courtier with impressive credentials' and contacts with the Roosevelts (loc.2530)? Did he terrify Scott Fitzgerald to such an extent that Dashiell Hammett was influenced in his crime noir (loc.2764)? Is For Whom the Bell Tolls 'a literary failure... an abysmal experiment with no discernible objective' (loc.2978)? You'll find all these claims in this book.