The Wildest Sun

October 9, 2023
Lemmie (Fifty Words for Rain) delivers a lackluster tale of an aspiring writer who grew up believing she’s the daughter of Ernest Hemingway and hopes that meeting him will bring fulfillment. Since childhood, Delphine Auber, now 17 in 1945 Paris, has taken care of her alcoholic mother Sylvie, who was once a friend to the Lost Generation writers and claimed Hemingway is Delphine’s father. Following Sylvie’s death, Delphine leaves Paris for New York City and lives in Harlem with Blue and Delia, family friends who show her parental love for the first time. She befriends Teddy, an ill-fated actress whose beauty and hard drinking remind Delphine of her mother. Desperate to fund a trip to Cuba to meet Hemingway, Delphine steals money from Teddy’s boyfriend. After arriving in Havana in December 1946, she hires a Spanish tutor who encourages her to approach Hemingway. She does, while Hemingway is fishing, but she’s afraid to take the conversation beyond small talk (“Papa didn’t claim me on sight,” she narrates dejectedly). The prose is hackneyed, but Lemmie manages to generate empathy for Delphine as she stays on in Cuba, where she reconsiders her assumptions about her paternity after receiving a letter from an old friend of Sylvie’s and tries her own hand at writing. This one’s for Lost Generation obsessives only.