The View from Havana

A journalist's passion for cars and boats becomes a story that's part travelogue, part personal adventure, and part literary study

It began with a simple question: was Ernest Hemingway a "car guy"? For journalist Mark Burrell, this initial curiosity turned into a decades long quest to learn more about Hemingway by finding the people who knew him best in Italy, Cuba, and Key West. With every interview and meeting, more questions arose. Was an old boat at Hemingway's Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, the real Pilar or a replica? Were Hemingway's furniture, art, and 9,000-book library still inside the Finca? How did Cubans feel about the American writer, and what role did he have in his community there? Was Hemingway's son, Patrick, right that losing his hilltop villa after 20 years was the "last straw" that led to his father's suicide?

Through a captivating blend of memoir and personal journalism, Burrell's explorations reveal a shy, sensitive artist who never recovered from losing Finca Vigía, Havana, Cojimar, and the "good natured people of the northern shore" to the Cold War. As Burrell got to know Patrick and those closest to Ernest Hemingway, he formed a novel view of "the bronze God of Literature," as he's known in Cuba. Burrell's adventures took him from dodging freighters at night in the Gulf Stream to racing vintage cars in Italy, all in pursuit of better understanding a literary giant.