Wikipedia says Hemmingway reckoned To Have And Have Not is ‘a bunch of junk’. I reckon he’s right. It’s a mish-mash of a couple of short stories. One’s about Harry Morgan, a hard on his luck fishing boat captain forced to take increasingly desperate measures to feed his family. The other’s about a bunch of utterly charmless writers drinking and shagging about in the Florida Keys. Both stories are shoved up against each other in a fairly artless manner (Heh. A half arse blogger calling Hemmingway ‘artless’. that’s what the Internet was made for, team.). The best bits are the very start, with some enthralling writing about big game fishing in the Cuban gulf stream, and the last three pages. The rest is fairly forgettable.
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