Hemingway's Chair [Paperback]

They should stock this at the Hemingway House in Key West, but they don't. Instead, create a bit of fun for yourself. Make yourself a Cuba Libre, grab this book and find yourself a hammock. You won't regret it.

Palin's style, here, reminds me most of Robert Coover in "The Universal Baseball Association" (also a great read, with a similar sort of spiritual-development-through-fantasy/admiration theme going on.) The book's tightly, carefully crafted, which is also good for we plot-mongers who are fed to the teeth with either exploitative, violent crap and/or the formless, self-indulgent not-quite-poetry stuff that sometimes passes for "real" novels.

This one's a must read also, for those of us looking (begging, hoping, praying...) for characters beyond the same ol' stereotypes. There isn't a flat, inhuman, dissed character (male or FEMALE!) anywhere in this story -- even the "bad" guys are complex in motivation and thought processes.

The writing of Michael Palin is quite at odds with the man of Monty Python skits. For me, Palin struck a chord that might be there in all of us. A desire to be in the same room with a great figure. Palin's charecter to me, doesn't want to be Hemingway, rather he would be quite happy just being in the same room with him. Seeing him, listening to him, basking in the relected glory of the man. Is this a religious zeal? I don't think so. Rather it is almost a love of the man and all he stands for.

Palin's cahrecters are all believeable. We all know the bustling new boss who wants to drag a perfectly serviceable work situation into the fast lane of the GPO. To him, this is his opportunity to excel and move up the ladder of success. No matter that there are people already in place who have long service in one office, know all the customers, thier children and their varied stories. To the boss, this is of no value; streamline, moderinize and economize are his watchwords. I don't like him. He ignores the history of the people around him and the place in which he is in the process of destroying. The rest of the charecters are just as true to life, including the American woman who intrudes on Martin's life and eventually awakens in him a Hemingwayesque way of dealing with the turmoil that has so changed his life.

I found this to be a book that made me think, not just about Palin's charecter, but my own outlook on life. It is not a book for someone who is looking for a printed version of the goofy charecters from Palin's sketches. Rather it is a thought provoking book that will make you sit and think afterwards and even during your reading of it. This is not a quick read but it is engrossing. It is a book, I hope that people will revisit periodically for a recharge in their batteries, the better to deal with reality.