In “The Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway takes us deep into the back country of Kenya and Tanzania in pursuit of big game, “pursuit and conversation,” “pursuit remembered,” “pursuit and failure,” and “pursuit as happiness.” The book fluctuates between in-the-moment hunting scenes and philosophical sidebars given in conversational pursuit, like the play-by-play and analyst format of the coverage of a modern sporting event. 

Hemingway never uses the phrase or describes the backcountry as green hills, although he once mentions that he saw nothing on the green hillsides when looking to kill a kudu. He does mention the blue hills three times, hence the recast of the title, not the most vivid imagery I’ve ever read, but he is a writer, not a landscape artist.

To improve my writing, I once bought a tool called Hemingway, which rated the complexity of your sentences to simplify and shorten them. That is to make them more Hemingway-esque. Hemingway wouldn’t have scored well with his eponymous tool, at least not with this book, with sentences like:

“Passing the skinner’s tent he showed me the head which looked, body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a very strange and unfortunate kudu.”

The tool would have shortened that to two sentences. That is not even a particularly long sentence compared to many others in the book, but I chose it as a sample because it does strike me as a very Hemingway-esque sentence for another reason. It’s not necessarily short but very raw and visceral. 

He lives the hunter’s ethic, killing in one shot so the animal doesn’t suffer (why shoot in the first place?). He loves to hunt as long as he kills cleanly, but as he demonstrably writes, it doesn’t always work out that way. Or, to use more Hemingway-esque language from a passage where he gut-shot a kudu, the worst thing a hunter could do because the animal escaped but would not live, 

“…they (hyenas) would get him before he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive.”

Nothing goes to waste if the animal drops dead and the hunting team finds it. The animals are skinned, beheaded, and chopped up for meat. They ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. Hemingway doesn’t kill female animals (does*), either, at least not on purpose. (*Grammarly needs help distinguishing between the noun plural of doe and the verb does.)

Hemingway competes with another member of his hunting party for the trophy head of the largest bull, fill in the blank of the species, rhino, sable, kudu, and so on. Killing the fittest animal contradicts everything Darwin had to say on the subject. It’s hard to read how beautiful and extraordinary the animal is in one sentence and how proud he is to have killed it in the next, rationalizing it all away with, “…they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute, and I had no guilty feeling at all.” Of course, we stand at a point in history where all those minute killings add up to one global genocide of just about anything more significant than a coyote.

Before throwing all this behavior on the bin heap of macho, it is worth noting that his wife accompanied him on this expedition and hunted on several of the forays he describes. But I can’t imagine a woman writing this scene where he fights with one of the members of his support team, M’Cola, who forgot to clean the rusty bore of Hemingway’s rifle as promised. We pick up the action where M’Cola sees the rusty gun and realizes he forgot to do his job.

“His face had not changed and I had said nothing but I was full of contempt and there had been indictment, evidence, and condemnation without a word being spoken.”** (**According to Grammarly, Hemingway has as many problems with commas as I do.)

Nothing visibly happened, but the tension between the two men is there because of the silence. It’s a nice piece of emotional minimalism. 

The most disturbing sentence in the book is a bacterial shot to the gut:

“Already I had had one of the diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an unnumbered amount of times a day.”

I think I would have just fed myself to the hyenas.

On one point, I can agree with Hemingway, “Beer is food.” On another, I hope he is wrong, “…what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer…Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.” I’d prefer not to survive a war to become a decent writer, although I understand you can’t get that kind of experience in a writing class.

If you are going to read a Hemingway book, this hunting memoir is probably not his best. It’s a dated piece that I read for particular motivations: 

• Descriptions of Africa to help me visualize the country for a book idea set in Africa.
• Examine work by a premiere author.
• Get into the mindset of a hunter.

It met all my goals. Happy hunting for whatever yours are.

Image by Google Labs FxImage

Or an African Horror Story, as I would retitle it, from the battlefields of the National Parks of Kenya, her life spent treating the collateral damage of the genocide of elephants and rhinoceros and the onslaught of human expansion and global warming on all animals in Kenya. As Daphne puts it, the animals always lose. Here are some online statistics to give you an idea of the numbers.

“In 1500, there were over 25 million elephants in Africa. By 1900, this had fallen to around 10 million; by 1979, it was down to 1.3 million.
There was a rapid decline in population size over the 1970s and 1980s, such that by the mid-1990s, numbers had fallen below 300,000. Over the following decades, conservation efforts across some countries managed to restore populations to over 470,000 in 2008. But increased poaching rates over the past decade have sent numbers back into decline.”
(Source: https://ourworldindata.org/elephant-populations)

Daphne calls her book a memoir, but technically, it is an autobiography, starting with her grandparents, who settled in Kenya before she was born, continuing through two marriages and two daughters, life in the National Parks that her second husband David Sheldrick had a big part in modernizing and protecting, taking her well beyond her retirement age while contributing to the foundation she created in honor of David Sheldrick. She lived and worked in places I remember from my 1983 African trip: Tsavo, Masa Mara, Amboseli, and Mt. Kenya. She moved to Nairobi National Park after her second husband’s death, a smaller park I skipped on the 1983 tour.

It’s a heart-wrenching story with a few successes but many tragic endings. After many failures, Daphne learned how to make a baby formula capable of sustaining orphaned elephant calves. A newborn baby elephant sucks on the mom’s teat every 15 minutes, the poster child of high maintenance. She reared and reintroduced elephants and rhinos to the wild. It takes a decade to successfully reintroduce an elephant to a wild state, a labor of love. Drop a rhino into the wild without helping it establish a territory, and another rhino is likely to kill it as an intruder. One of her reintroduced rhinos helped repopulate rhinos in Tsavo. Some of her elephant orphans went on to give birth and raise calves in the wild, contributing to the rise of that population in the first decade of this millennium.

It’s also a tale of the inner lives of animals, from mongooses and dik-diks to sheep to warthogs to elephants. Daphne learns to read the body language of her wards. Anyone with a pet knows that animals have an inner life, and after reading the book, this applies to elephants in spades, as Daphne watches them grieve, support one another, and make inferences. She recounts stories of elephant memory and intuition. An elephant in the wild for twenty-five years tenderly greets her trainer from age five. Her penned elephants wait at the gate for new arrivals to her orphanage before they arrive without any apparent means of knowing they are en route to their remote location. Daphne belly rubs her way into the trust of rhinos. She learns the personality of the creatures she cares for, even a sheep she uses to befriend and butt heads with an orphaned rhino. It amazes me that it took scientists so long to catch on. See Frans De Waal’s work for more on that.

But despite her most loving efforts, no elephant has ever chosen to stay in a stable, always choosing a more dangerous wilderness existence over a domestic pen. However, on occasion, once-resident elephants returned for medical help or help for offspring, sometimes entrapped in snares, wounded with machete cuts, injured with darts, or suffering the effects of drought, which shuts down lactation. Acknowledging their sentience and intelligence in the context of brutality is what makes this such a heart-wrenching and inspiring story.

Using words like murder instead of poaching would more accurately describe what is going on. Would we tolerate people getting slaughtered for molar extractions or having their noses ground down for some old man’s erection? Maybe. People don’t treat outsiders much better (where an outsider is relative to anyone’s particular point of view). Daphne survived the turbulent times of the end of colonialism in Africa, a less than peaceful process. She recounts tales of a family of her neighbors getting burned alive in their own house and other atrocities. Park Rangers were trained in World War II combat tactics to stop the poaching, but many were killed in the effort, anyway. She survived a lifetime of tragedy and death, both animal and human.

How does she get through it all? Daphne says despite all the tragedy, the dead are at peace and no longer suffer. You have to move forward and help those who can still be helped, focusing on the problems before you and not the tragedies of what has passed. She encourages us to think like elephants who forgive even when they can never forget.

She survived through it all, through two marriages, raising two daughters, and contributing to the knowledge of rearing and reintroducing animals back into the wild, creating the David Sheldrick (2nd Husband) Wildlife Trust that continues its work with orphaned animals, conservation, and community outreach. Her life was a love story told in the context of a still ongoing one-sided war.

(https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/projects)

Spoiler Alert: If you plan on watching the Vortex, you might want to save this for another day.

“So, how do your characters time travel?”
“They use vortex glasses.”
“Vortex glasses? How do they work?”
“First, you put ’em on.”
“I assumed that part. How does the time travel part work?”
“Well, the characters don’t time travel per se. But they see into the past. And can talk to characters still living in the past.”
“Do the characters living in the past have glasses?”
“How could they? In the past, they have yet to be invented.”
“So the present only projects its image into the past. That seems lopsided. What do they talk about?”
“Well, the character in the future could tell the character in the past to go kill Hitler before Hitler kills them.”
“But what if Hitler was an ancestor?”
“Exactly, Then that character would disappear, and the story would end. But my character in the present timelines is the protagonist. So, we can’t have that, now can we? But, now, suppose the protagonist has a conversation with his first wife from the past to correct some evil like her own murder, but the protagonist husband’s second family disappears as a result. The husband would have to figure out what deviation his dead wife caused in the new past and convince her to undo the action that caused the problem while still correcting the original problem of her murder. But the wife from the new past might not be incented to correct it. In this case because she survives her murder but loses her husband.”
“So, her murderer is the villain, and the wife from the past is the antagonist?”
“Exactly. Every time future husband and past wife talk, some important event in the intervening interval changes for the worse. Fixing one unintended consequence results in another. The husband arrives at work to find a new boss because his old boss is dead. Or his best friend isn’t married to the woman he knew as his wife.”
“So the husband knows the true timeline, but all the other characters in his time only know the altered timeline?”
“Yes.”
“And the guy that lived the protagonist’s life up to that point is replaced by the guy in the original timeline in the altered present timeline.”
“You got it.”
“So the person the husband would have been in the new present dies every time the timeline changes?”
“The interval version of the protagonist is of no interest to the story. Other than to note that his past wife’s murderer killed various other people, depending on the timeline.”
“So the protagonist is a body snatcher.”
“It’s his body to snatch, isn’t it?”
“Does the wife remember the other timelines?”
“She has no future memories, and her time advances linearly from when she first meets her hologram husband to when she is murdered in the original timeline.”
“So she is timeline blind and the one on the clock?”
“Yes. The husband has no control over the clock. He can’t jump back at arbitrary points in her timeline to undo his and her mistakes.”
“Why not?”
“Vortex physics.”
“Plot-based physics. I assume the other characters have access to these glasses and are also changing timelines?”
“No. That would have been an interesting plot point if I had wanted to make a comedy. If all the time-messaging characters remembered the true timeline, what happens when they all change to an alternate timeline, and nobody has any memory of the current timeline and they somehow meet? All the confusion could have been good for a few laughs.”
“Couldn’t they reorganize themselves from memory into how the true timeline played out and be done with it?”
“Not if some are incapacitated, in prison, or dead. But I only allow the protagonist to time travel, and at one plot-convenient point, his daughter, so I don’t have that problem.”
“Why can’t anyone else time travel?”
“Because it’s not anyone else’s story.”
“Hmm. So, back to my original question. How do the glasses work?”
“They work by augmented reality. For example, if there is enough time-based evidence, the husband detective can see all the evidence at a crime scene and possibly even a reenactment.”
“Where does the wife come in?”
“As part of the augmented reality, but the past is real. That’s the twist.”
“So, the present and the past have to meet at the same place.”
“No. The present has vortex glasses, so they can be wherever they need to be as the plot dictates. The past doesn’t have the vortex glasses, so they must be at the physical place. The wife just shows up.”
“Actually, if you are not seeing the present reality, then the technology would be virtual reality, not augmented reality.”
“Vortex reality, with holodeck-like technology. Each appears as a hologram in the other’s reality.”
“Sure. So how does it end?”
“In the latest present timeline, the husband dies at the hand of the wife’s murderer.”
“So she doesn’t save herself and gets her husband killed?”
“Yeah.”
“Brutal ending.”
“But then at the synchronized moment.”
“Synchronized moment? What’s that?”
“When something happens in both the past and the present at the same time.”
“You mean like when they meet in the holodeck?”
“No. I mean at the time when she gets murdered and he gets murdered in their respective timelines, simultaneously.”
“What? How can something in the past and the present happen simultaneously?”
“The vortex of course. It happens at the time of the murder and at the time of the anniversary when the wife was killed in the past.”
“I see. It is a convenient point in both storylines. Physics has nothing to do with it. Was there a story-synchronized moment in all the other alternate-timeline leaps to establish this rule?”
“That’s not important, either. Let me finish. Just before the synchronized moment, the husband gets killed by the wife’s murderer. At the synchronized moment, the wife discovers her true murderer from the past and kills him. The husband undies in the present, quite relieved to discover himself undead.”
“The sci-fi version of deus ex machina. So the protagonist remembers the true timeline and all the other time he spends in altered timelines. And he even realizes that he is undead. But none of the other characters do.”
“Right. The vortex glasses get destroyed, and that breaks the cycle. In the final timeline, the husband meets the wife twenty-seven years after she killed her murderer.”
“How does that work out?”
“The alternate earlier self of the husband in the last timeline threw her in jail for killing her would-be murderer, and his daughter despises him because of it.”
“Because the alternate husband didn’t know about his wife’s murder in that timeline?”
“Yes. The wife is quite happy to meet the timeline-jumping husband who saved her life by telling her about her imminent murder in the first place. She is quite relieved to be rid of his alternate, earlier self.”
“So if someone in the past killed Hitler before they were able to kill anyone, they would get thrown in jail as a murderer and no one else would appreciate their sacrifice.”
“Yes. Until the one person who lived and remembers the original timeline returns.”
“I see. He is the only one that can validate his wife’s actions.”
“She waits 27 years for it.”
“Sounds sad. It’s not good enough to do a great deed. One must be appreciated for it.”
“Now you get it.”
“So who made the vortex?”
“Only the vortex knows.”

• “Damn Ye Whale,” Captain Ahab.

Spoiler Alert. Watch the K-Drama “The Glory” before reading any of this. It’s worth the sixteen-episode investment. I will wait…

You came back! You made it through the raw, intrigue-filled K-drama. Although the action can be challenging to follow as it meanders in time and memory, and it is rife with coincidence and questions (like how and why does the blinded guy who just got run over by a cement truck manage to walk up several flights of stairs at an unpopulated construction site with unset cement in the middle of the night). The pace is unrelenting, the performances, particularly of the two lead women, are outstanding, and the dialog is piercing and eminently quotable.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and few do it so delayed, dispassionately, and calculated as Moon Dong-eun, waiting eighteen years to exact her revenge after her antagonists had built successful lives worth destroying. The story is more an execution of her crafted revenge jujitsu than an escalation of her attempts to overcome her now grown-up and successful antagonists, who tortured her in high school. She exploits all the cracks in their mean lives, one metaphorical curling iron burn at a time, depriving them of whatever “Glory” they had accumulated. 

Dong-eun pursues the victim’s “Glory.” She says, “Among the things that victims have lost, how many things do you think they can reclaim? It’s just their own glory and honor. Nothing more. Some regain those things through forgiveness, while others regain them through revenge. Only then can they reach the starting point.” Like Captain Ahab, her path is not one of forgiveness but vengeance. Unlike Captain Ahab, revenge is her glory, not her demise. Ahab’s madness destroyed his ship, crew, and himself. Dong-eun redeems her co-victims and co-conspirators, bringing back their honor, even in death. It is her redemption, not her destruction.

Dong-eun doesn’t have the misbelief of a protagonist to battle. She has to hang on to her hatred, not overcome it. She says, “I’d like to stay faithful to my rage and vice.” She doesn’t grow as a character, but that is the point. She has been on the same path for the last eighteen years. Her life stopped at nineteen. She would effectively be nineteen years old if she ever started over and could put the past behind her. But that isn’t her expectation. She says, “I wish to be happy enough that I could die. I want to be happy, just by that much.” That’s a hell of a minimalist starting over point or maybe a foreshadowing of the endpoint, her high school abuse having robbed her of any chance at life. 

The one obstacle Dong-eun has to overcome is her crazy orange-haired mother, Jung Mi-hee. It is Dong-eun’s one emotional outburst in the whole series. Mom has to set Dong-eun’s apartment on fire before Dong-eun can finally take the steps necessary to overcome her mom’s hold over her. 

The psychiatrist diagnosing Jung Mi-hee for commitment writes IED for “Intermittent Explosive Disorder” in his notebook as the mom rages, curses, and shouts incoherently. The same note would apply to any of Dong-eun’s antagonists, to the point where they all act as if having a perpetual psychotic break from reality and each other. There is nothing likable about the five tormenters. They are sadistic and cruel. They are barbaric to their victims and vicious to one another. 

Perhaps the series would have benefited from more toned-down but impactful scenes like Yeon-jin’s (her chief assailant) final weather report to a prison audience rather than her prime-time audience, having completely lost her glory, with a tear streaming down her eye. “Is she crying at the weather?” asks one of her uncomprehending cellmates. Yeon-jin finally knows. It’s her one moment of powerless self-realization. The other moment might have been begging her utterly indifferent mom for recognition in their mutual prison, but her mom was so corrupt it hardly seemed like a punishment. 

What the antagonists overdo in unbridled emotion, Dong-eun makes up for in cold-blooded minimalism, giving only the faintest smile as her tormentors fall, with taunting daggers like, “I hope that in the end, whether I’m in the world or not, your world will be full of me.”

One wonders if there is anything worth starting over for in this world filled with only two kinds of people: past, present, and future victims and their psychotic perpetrators. Once Dong-eun achieves her “Glory,” Dong-eun is about to commit suicide. Is she happy enough to die, or does she have nothing to live for, not even her love interest, go teacher, and “headsman,” Joo Yeo-joeng? 

Yeo-jeong’s mother conveniently shows up on the rooftop of the old school building at the pivotal moment. She talks her down, giving Dong-eun new purpose in assisting Yeo-joeng with his desire for vengeance against his tormenter and killer of his father. Dong-eun finds purpose in plotting another revenge, pursuing it with the same cold, ruthless efficiency as her own revenge, switching roles with her “headsman.” Unlike poor Captain Ahab, whose obsession dragged him to hell’s heart at the bottom of the ocean, Dong-eun’s retribution leads to revenge as a lifestyle choice and maybe another season for the series.

It seems like an odd note to end the series on. But after thinking about it, I warmed up to the ending. Despite Dong-eun’s claims of self-corruption and emptiness, “I don’t plan on being a better person. I’m becoming worse everyday,” she is the moral center of the story. She brings honor to Yoon So-hee in death, finds honor in at least one adult in her childhood (grandma), saves the innocent children and Mrs. Kang, delivers absolution to other victims even if it serves her purpose, and destroys the villains in the most punishing way imaginable. She may be stabbing at her white whale from hell’s heart, but if hell has a moral high ground, Dong-eun has found it.

Dong-eun’s mother and others ignored or stood by while she was tortured and did nothing. But something is changing. Dong-eun told Yoon So-hee, “I was thinking I’m the only victim that mattered.” She acknowledges decency in some adults. Grandma saved her life when Dong-eun was at the depths of her despair after her abuse. She says, “There was a time when I used to think, what if someone had just helped me? If someone, somewhere, had been there for me?” She steps off that ledge because her death will kill someone she cares about. “And when you said we should die in spring you meant that’s when we should bloom.” So maybe she does grow in the end, seeing beyond herself and finally caring for someone, even if she still chooses a path of revenge and not forgiveness. 

“Damn ye whale! And all whales like you.”

Image by craiyon