DISCOVERIES

Making Love

A Romance

Lucretia Stewart

University of Wisconsin Press: 228 pp., $21.95

She’s just a girl who cain’t say no, she’s in a terrible fix. Remember that song from “Oklahoma”? Substitute a backdrop of 1970s London and you’ve got the heroine of this quasi-autobiographical novel.

She’s 42, “no nearer to finding happiness or love, let alone the two together.” She’s had a number of lovers (“we are talking double figures”) since her first romance at 17. “But I measure being in love by the amount of pain I experience. True love is, by definition, unrequited.”

By that measure Louis, a “desperately handsome” alcoholic, always attached -- if only by a fine thread -- to someone else, is the love of this nameless woman’s life.

The two became lovers when she was 18, and Louis reappears 25 years later on the day of her father’s funeral. She jumps back into mutual, passionate torment as if nothing had ever changed between them. While describing their affair, she ventures back over the last several decades to describe every lover she’s ever had in exquisite detail.

“I was always looking to fall in love, to be in love. I wanted a great love, my life’s companion, a comrade-in-arms, someone with whom I could metaphorically, if not literally, climb mountains.” This woman’s obsession with relationships will remind many readers of Anais Nin.

Many of her early lovers thread their way throughout her life. Some are married (what the French call un cinq a sept for the couple of hours between work and home a married man can devote to an affair), some are the lovers of friends or even of relatives.

Nothing seems to stop this girl, not even a lack of attraction. “I was,” she realizes at one point, “pathetically grateful for their desire and failed to recognize its indiscriminate nature.” Stewart is a fine writer, never sentimental, always frank but not off-putting. This is not a novel of regrets, nor is it meant to be sexually thrilling. Would you want to live the life of Stewart’s heroine?

*

Hemingway in Africa

The Last Safari

Christopher Ondaatje

Overlook Press: 238 pp., $37.50

What gets into these guys who are blinded by the Hemingway legend? The guys who have their pictures taken in front of the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi as if by walking in the man’s shoes, drinking what he drank and killing what he killed they could describe the world in the same way!

Christopher Ondaatje doesn’t have it quite so bad, but he believes that by seeing, step by step, the Africa that Hemingway saw on his two safaris (1933-34 and 1953-54), he will arrive at a better understanding of the lifeline between the writer’s fiction and his experience. But it is pre-colonial Africa, “before it went irreparably wrong,” that Ondaatje seeks. “This was the Africa that Hemingway sought and found.”

He believes that Hemingway felt much the way his protagonist Harry in the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” felt, that he had “frittered away his literary talent on a life of luxury and will now never produce anything enduring.”

Ondaatje, through his travels, comes to understand how completely Hemingway had “smothered his talent in self-importance.” He also has a better sense of the writer’s relationship to killing (animals) and how it changed between the two safaris, as well as an increased respect for Hemingway’s lifelong friendship with his guide, Philip Percival.

Ondaatje quotes these words from Hemingway’s book “Green Hills of Africa”: “I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot, and I had been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing or another, and I, truly, did not mind that any more. Since I still loved to hunt, I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could kill cleanly and as soon as I lost that ability I would stop.”

Perhaps most revealing of all is Ondaatje’s understanding of the role that Africa played in Hemingway’s life and work. “Africa in the morning promises the world. It is a place and a time where the idea of becoming one’s best self and achieving one’s best work seems attainable. Hemingway achieved immortality through his best work, and part of it is African.”