From run-ins with Hemingway in Havana to gunmen in Guatemala, this colourful collection of the late writer’s long-form journalism shows why Graham Greene was an admirer
he travelogues of Norman Lewis, which are much admired for the extraordinary burnish they attain, were written by him in a spidery longhand. The author of acclaimed accounts of the Sicilian mafia and the exploitation of Indigenous tribes in South America, he scribbled his rewrites on fresh scraps of paper and, with the help of his wife Lesley, pasted them over earlier drafts until his manuscript crackled like parchment.
It’s a little early in the year to be handing out cups but I doubt that there will be a finer book of nonfiction than this in 2025. It includes an encounter in, at the time the most celebrated author in the world. Lewis was astonished to see “exhaustion and emptiness” on that much reproduced face., no mean travel writer himself and a great admirer of Lewis, liked to quote the poet Robert Browning: “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
If he harked back to years gone by, so, too, does this collection: to the day before yesterday, a time now entirely unrecoverable, when editors of newspapers and magazines commissioned writers such as Lewis to produce long-form journalism. Although no one called it that at the time, because it didn’t occur to anyone to find its length remarkable. No successor to Lewis could subsist on journalistic commissions today.
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