Truth at dawn

About two years ago, around the centenary of Hemingway's death, his son Patrick decided to publish an unreleased novel by him. Or rather, he took an unrevised manuscript of over 800 pages and made a reduced version of it. It is this unpublished work that now reaches us in Portuguese translation, and which is titled "True at First Light". It is well known that Hemingway meticulously worked on his originals and rewrote them several times. Hence, the stylistic quality of this novel will certainly not be his best. But the essential themes that permeate his work, especially that of his later years, are present. A lion hunt during his last trip to East Africa with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, in 1953, brings to the fore a theme dear to him: the role of violence in human survival, here in the natural environment of the hunt, an ancestral rite of blood and survival, which at the same time shows a profound respect for the victim, placing man and his frailties, but also his strengths, before death. And also camaraderie, the passion for strong character, the admiration for animal dignity.