When a boy sold into slavery finds the courage to escape, he is saved by a mysterious stranger, who raises the boy as his own.

Renamed Cesare Montenero after Sicily’s own black mountain, Mount Etna, the boy begins to develop unusual talents, and discovers that he has more in common with his saviour than he imagined. And when he meets the enigmatic Celeste, he suspects for the first time that he may not be alone.

Based on factual events and ranging through Italy, Paris and the rural fringes of coastal Australia, Black Mountain is a haunting exploration of what it means to be human.

I have recently reviewed this book for an online journal and my review can be found at

http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/bitstream/2328/26722/1/Black_Mountain.pdf

(Source: talewaggercreations)

I came to this book via Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, a fiction novel that I enjoyed very much. In the list of research sources McLain cites A Moveable Feast as one of her sources. A friend who also read The Paris Wife (we belong to the same book group and it was one of our reading list books) bought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and then offered to loan it to me. I am so glad she did that. I really enjoyed the book as Hemingway writes his memories, sort of journal-style, of his time in Paris when he was early 20s and it was the 1920s. He has deliberately avoided trying to introduce his own personal life too much in relation to his first marriage, and yet there are little bits of his personal life with Hadley and later their son Mr Bumby and even FPuss their cat who faithfully guarded their infant son.
What I most liked about this work though is the insights into his writing process that it provides, his times when he was frustrated with his lack of progress, the moments of writer’s block and how he sought overcome them. His pursuit of the ‘one true sentence’ and his constant editing and refining. ‘It could take a whole morning to write a paragraph’.
His writing is lean, and he deplores descriptive paragraphs for their own sake, yet his whole book is one long description; of his work and the process of writing, of certain of his friends and fellow writers, and through it all the fact that he didn’t bemoan his poverty, but allowed it to be a spur towards discipline.
I shall have to purchase a copy of this for my own book shelf as a re-read in moments when I wonder about why I like words, or to write them. It will be a spur to maintain a discipline of practise and to not fear the process of redrafting and refinement until the best one can do is the goal.

(Source: talewaggercreations)