To Read Before You Go

Though Hemingway is known for his time in Key West, he only has one novel set there. And it is, honestly, one of my favorites: To Have and Have Not. This also happens to be his only novel set in America. It is fitting that his only novel set in America is a place much on the fringe of American life, a foreign place.

The novel depicts Harry Morgan, a boat captain who takes tourists out for fishing trips. When an American client runs up a large tab and skips town, Harry Morgan is left broke. To feed his family, he agrees to pick up Chinese immigrants in Cuba and bring them to Florida. Morgan ends up killing the man who arranged the transaction and is killed in the end by revolutionaries.

Last February, my boyfriend (referred to as “B.”) and I went to Miami and the Keys. It was my first time to that part of Florida and his first time to Florida at all. I feel nostalgic for that trip right now (as I heard someone say recently, “February is the Monday of months.”). We drove down the Keys from Miami in a silver convertible. Even though I am white as white can be, my skin took on a deep tan that week from constantly being in the sun. When we went back to the winter of Memphis, I honestly couldn’t have felt better, like the sun had healed something in me.

I understood what Hemingway loved so much about Key West when I got there. Now, of course, it is touristy as it can be: men charge for photos with their roosters and purveyors of sunglasses crowd the sidewalks. Hemingway’s house itself had the longest line and was like a theme park (though I took pleasure in looking at his bookshelf spine by spine and taking copious photos of the six-toed cats wandering the property). We decided our view of the sunset from the roof of our building overlooking the Mississippi River was much better than the sunset from the end of the island, but if it weren’t for the crowds and the street performers at the sunset celebration that happens nightly in Key West, the sunsets off the edge of the US would be spectacular. We could only imagine how the sunset looked from the top of the lighthouse we’d climbed up that morning.

However, the islands had an indescribable feeling. I could imagine what it had been like there when there was no one around. The tiny beaches with sticks and rocks in the sand, and the close wooden houses with roosters to wake you at dawn. It feels beach-y and vacation-y and festive but also somehow foreign and close.

To Have and Have Not is probably better known as the movie with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner and though it isn’t quite close to the novel, is a very good movie (I’m a Lauren Bacall fan). The novel itself didn’t do very well, and Hemingway himself is known to have thought it unsuccessful. 

Something about this novel felt more accessible to me than Hemingway’s other novels. Maybe it was his love for Key West that comes through in the whole thing. The plot after all is wrapped up in the place—the “0 Mile” is the closest point to Cuba. When B. and I stood there, we pretended we could see that forbidden island in the distance, a mere 94 miles away. If Cuba wasn’t so close and the world wasn’t in the state it was in the 1930’s, To Have and Have Not would have been naught. Maybe the answer to my love for this book is in this title. It appealed to my romantic sensibilities in my early 20s. It somehow captured what I felt as a young (and slightly dramatic) college student—I’d had but I had not lived. While here Harry Morgan, the book’s protagonist is dodging danger, bringing people illegally from Cuba to the US.

Hemingway also uses the poor residents of the islands (“Conchs”) in the early 20th century as a picture of the American depression. It is also said that the book is heavily influenced by Marxism, which Hemingway was fighting for at the time he was writing this novel in the Spanish Civil War. That side of things never interested me. It was Hemingway-esque  complexity of Harry Morgan. His no-nonsense, his ulitmate demise, and to an extent his insider position among the Key West locals.

Touristy crowded vacation spot aside, the Florida Keys are truly lovely. The best way to enjoy To Have and Have Not is on the beach with a Mojito where you can scan the distant waters for Harry Morgan’s boat and any trouble that lies ahead.

I just booked a flight to visit my lovely sister in Nashville in a couple weeks. Of courses she moves to Tennessee as soon as I leave. I thought in honor of my trip and in honor of my recent home (Memphis), I’d write a post about Peter Taylor’s novel, A Summons to Memphis.

This is about a man who got away from Memphis. He lives in New York City with his girlfriend of many years but gets called home when his mother dies and his father begins dating and possibly marrying a younger woman. When his spinster sisters are concerned about their father’s behavior to the point that they think their inheritance is in jeopardy, they call the narrator, Phillip Carver, home to Memphis.

I’m not sure how interesting this book would be for someone travelling to Memphis for the first time. It was interesting to me when I lived in Memphis so it may be better for those familiar with Memphis or if you plan on travelling to Tennessee and want a gist of the history.

The book never takes into account Memphis’ black population but gives an interesting look at the affluent population of the city in the early 20th century. It also helps describe the differences between Nashville and Memphis. The Carver family, before reaching their current predicament, was once forced to leave Nashville because of a bad business deal. When the children were young, they made a pilgrimage across Tennessee, from the more desirable Nashville to the peculiarities of Memphis. It is suggested that this move not only ruins the oldest’s sisters prospects of marriage, but also throws Mrs. Carver into depression. Her family occupied a prominent place in Nashville society before her marriage.

This book is personally fascinating to me as well because of the are of Memphis the family moves to. Their house is near the intersection of Cleveland and Madison. Anyone who has been to this intersection in present day Memphis knows you wouldn’t want to sit at the stoplight without your doors locked or your windows rolled down; you would also not want to veer to the south of Madison.

When my boyfriend and I made the trek from our downtown loft to Midtown (usually to our favorite Indian restaurant) we would always drive down Madison swerving around on the trolley tracks. At Cleveland, near the end of the Madison Street Trolley Line, there is a cluster of buildings which line the street. Most of the buildings are two story with a store at street level and boarded windows on the second floor. I’ve always been fascinated by this stretch of Madison because of the stores that occupied the ground floor. You’d think in Memphis, a city where most of the buildings downtown are empty (maybe becoming less true), these little storefronts with peeling paint and bars on the windows would also be empty. But these little stores were always full.

These were the types of places I would have loved to discover in my suburban teenage years which seem painfully authentic and gritty. Over the three years I lived in Memphis, the stores changed: a little Italian place became a chicken wing restaurant, an empty store put up signs that they now sold cookies, the African religion store was a standard, as well as the African braid store. There was a phone/internet/money transfer store and a hardware shop that seemed to have been there for a long time.

If I wasn’t driving, I would always hope we got the red light or ask my boyfriend to drive slow so I could look more closely at the shops, perhaps see something that I’d never seen before, some corner of life I wasn’t familiar with.

A Summons to Memphis is a good introduction to Tennessee’s largest cities. Taylor explains their differences well; these differences still seem to hang on today. While Taylor ignores a whole part of Memphis, the part of its history he does described is equally important in understanding the city and told in an authentic manner. While I usually don’t like novels written in first person where the narrator is a writer (gee I wonder who “Phillip” is), A Summons to Memphis is worth a read. If you find yourself in Memphis, you may want to seek out the intersection of Madison and Cleveland, but unfortunately, it’d probably be best to stay in your car.

Also an award-winning film, this novel by Andre Dubus III paints a surreal and smoky picture of San Francisco and the coastline just south. If you are planning to drive down Highway 1 south from San Francisco, read this book first. My boyfriend and I drove from San Francisco to Carmel last summer, and we had both recently read The House of Sand and Fog. It was fun to imagine the contested house in Corona (a made up town) as one of the many bungalows in the small towns lining the coast south of San Fran, or searching among the suburban homes off the highway for Lester Burdon’s house. It’s easy to imagine such a dark story taking place in the emerald evergreens and foggy hills in the region. 

Kathy Nicolo, a former drug addict, is left by her husband with her sole possession: a bungalow her father left her. When the house is taken away from her mistakenly by the county, Colonel Behrani, exiled from Iran, buys the house cheap at auction. The house means everything to him and takes the last of his savings. It is his last chance to make a new life for his family in America.

This tightly woven novel alternates between first person sections by Kathy and the colonel. The reader switches loyalties just as often while the battle for the house on Bisgrove unfolds. The ending is utterly heartbreaking, but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens.

Try to forget the movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t until you’ve read the book and driven through the area. The book’s characters are much more homely seeming than the movie, especially Jennifer Connelly’s version of Kathy. She is never as distraught or sweaty as I imagined Kathy to be.

Andre Dubus III writes a compelling novel that beautifully uses the landscape of northern California to enhance the story.

This blog will be a space to recommend mainly novels to read before you travel somewhere. A guide book can only tell you so much. A novel can tell you how life was in a certain time in the place you are going to. For example, reading The Sun Also Rises can tell you how Paris in the 20s was in a way a guide book could never convey. I will try to stick to less obvious books. Hopefully these suggestions will give you a new picture of the trip you are embarking on, suggest landmarks to find, or a way of making an imagined world concrete.

Some of the books will be about places I have visited myself and so I will try to describe my experiences a little bit, but for the most part, I will leave it up to you to discover the world inside these novels.

The way this works is that I post about single books. Each book will be tagged. If you are going to Europe, you can click the “Europe” tag and see all the books tagged for that place. 

Thank you for visiting “To Read Before You Go.” Happy reading and Bon Voyage.