The Weather in Africa: Three Novellas

Although I've read at least one other work of fiction by Martha Gellhorn, I most often think of her as the tough-minded, fearless war correspondent, who learned something of her craft from Hemingway and lived to surpass him in the field of journalism. Yet she had a gift for story-telling as well, and in The Weather in Africa she tells three somewhat connected stories about European "settlers" in East Africa in the years immediately following WWII and just prior to Kenyan Independence. Some of her main characters are sympathetic on a personal level, while others are emblematic, in varying degrees of reprehensibility, of the colonial attitude toward the native people who serve them. There are only one or two fully realized African show more characters here, but they stand out as complex individuals, perhaps more so than the white players. Without being either predictable or unbelievable, each story moves toward an ending in which not everyone gets exactly what we may think they deserve, but the people we most hope to see happy are on a promising path. show less

I'm honestly not sure that this is as good as I think it is or whether it was exactly what I needed to read right now. Whichever is true, The Weather in Africa is a very readable look at the European experience of living in Kenya in the years immediately prior to Kenyan independence.
The three novellas (the middle one being more a long short story) are set in a hotel on Kilimanjaro, at a beach resort, and on a dairy farm in the highlands. The last two are related to the first only by one-sentence references to the hotel.
"On the Mountain" follows the contrasting experiences of sisters whose parents own the hotel. Like all good fairy tales one is beautiful and one is plain; one is good and one is selfish. The qualities are somewhat mixed, show more and each sister gets her just deserts.
"By the Sea" is one of the saddest things I've ever read. Thank goodness it's short! The central character is a woman emptied of life by the death of her son from leukemia. She finds that time is satisfactorily consumed by doing nothing at the hotel, and then she ventures inland with dramatic results.
"In the Highlands" follows an ex-POW released from a German stalag at the end of WWII. He has trouble relating to people, but he has no trouble at all in falling in love with a dairy farm which he buys and begins to rebuild. Then he meets a woman and life changes, but not maybe in a way that romantics might hope.
Gellhorn writes smoothly and well, and the whole thing is larger experience than its parts. show less

Martha Gellorn - Ernest Hemingway's long-time lover - really knows Kenya well, and this is a marvellous tale about Europeans in Africa, and how their inner weather is very different from the perfect sunny climes in which the story unfolds.