I’ve long been a fan of Hemingway. I even got to visit the house on Key West last summer. Yet I found this to be a meandering mess. True enough, this was posthumously published, but I suspect there was a reason why Papa never got around to finishing this before he died. It reminded me of Harper Lee, and the relationship of Go Set a Watchman to To Kill a Mockingbird. Disappointing. ( )

As a woman, to read Islands in the Stream, is to enter a "man's world" as conceived by Hemingway. Tom Hudson,an American ex-pat who lived Paris and Italy during the jazz age period, has settled down, more or less, on the island of Bimini. At the outset of the book, Hudson combines a workman-like painting schedule at a studio in his home, with the social life in the bar of a nearby fishing village. In this "manly" world, Hudson, another ex-pat friend, and local men engage in a kind of society that involves trading insults, drinking and fighting, and various forms of danger at sea.

Islands in the Stream contains three distinct sections, setting out three periods in Tom Hudson's life. Read it to experience Hemingway's fine descriptive writing, and his skills in sharing both Hudson's contemporaneous thoughts as well as his personal reflections on the various chapters of his life, ( )

Written in Spanish.

The first section of this book should stand alone--the rest is all right, but it's more like a version of "I wonder what happened to this character AFTER the book was finished?" As in, "what did Nick Carraway do AFTER he went back home to the Midwest?" But it's worth it solely for the first (and, I believe, the longest) section--three-and-a-half stars. ( )

I've long been a fan of Old Man and the Sea - it was my all time favorite beach read a while back. So, when I learned that these stories constituted the foundation and origin of that story, I was eager to read it on vacation this year. Our vacation was interrupted, and reading wasn't an option, so I'm just now finishing it - far from the shore.

Islands in the Stream are three connected stories published together posthumously by Hemingway's wife and publisher. They had editing duties - giving 400 or so pages the ax - but informed sources say they were well acquainted with EH's editorial preferences, and they added nothing to the text.

The protagonist is a wealthy painter with a history of being an international celebrity who hobnobs with the greatest minds and creators of his time... this isn't a relatable circumstance, but probably what readers wanted most with their escapism reading. The wealth and privilege aren't very becoming when it comes to how his life of leisure, stable of servants, and variety of luxury living situations are concerned. This isn't to say he lives a life free of pain. Pain is something he has no shortage of, and as the story progresses - it becomes nearly all he has.

It was endearing and fascinating to read how "the other half" lives, and how that life relates to (and is in contrast with) my own experience. Especially when we have art in common. Thomas Hudson prides himself on a strong work ethic - probably to not lose his male audience who already has to swallow the story of a man who lives in luxury doing as he wishes, with occasional visits from (virtually abandoned) children and starlet ex-wives. Very little of his character's mindset is relatable to an artist. Rather - TH sounds a lot more like a writer posing as an artist (several factors make Stephen King's Duma Key look to be influenced by IitS).

The sections were of distinctly different tones and flavors. The protagonist at times only feels like the same character because he shares the same name, and sparse sentences of reference to an earlier phase of life. He certainly strives to erase his pain by both ignoring it, and drinking his brain into a state malleable enough to forget. The sources of his pain are felt and empathized with by this reader, at least, so that tenuous connection still holds.

It isn't 100% clear how Old Man and the Sea originated with this period of working - but if it was intended as follow-up to a struggle in the first act (Bimini), the result will always be a different staging when reading OMatS, and a powerful one.

Hemingway is forever analyzed for his portrayal of gendered issues - and those looking closely tend to give him more slack as the years go by. I don't personally get the sexist claims and demonized perspective others paint him with - I see genuine reflection, given honestly, by someone who loves women - but is not himself a woman or a man who would make an effort to put himself in a woman's shoes, not being one. There may be an empathy gap there - but his empathy gap is broad and showing at all times for other men, of other race, proclivity, social and financial means. He's true to himself (whatever we think of that self), and he proudly broadcasts that women are frequently at the center of all his happiest memories, relationships, and enriching life moments.

A man feeling a need to erase painful loses is at the heart of the stories. So much so, that a couple of those critical and pointed loses are never again referred to after book one. The absence hurt me. The lost lives were more pronounced for it. By not dealing with some things, he made those things much, much bigger - but the notion that a man must cry, but that seeing that crying is a chief disgust, has shackled him to a damaged and hobbled existence with dwindling meaning. And we (I) never stop relating and connecting with that life. At times uncomfortable, to say the least, I never stopped liking the story and wanting more of it.

The book reads like an album assembled by the family, and remaining band members, after the death of a band's lead vocalist. I can't see it as complete or as a pure product of its creator - however hard I try. That is what keeps it from achieving a 5th star, for me. But it is his work, and what's there of it is absolutely worth the time to share with him. ( )