Book Review : One Last Glimpse

This book was inspired by a car journey made by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, described in The Moveable Feast by Hemingway.

One Last Glimpse is set in 1929. I believe the young narrator called Kit is based on James Aldridge. Kit is an Australian who receives an introduction to Hemingway from a fellow countryman in London, who knows Hemingway from the 1923 Turkish-Greek war.

Kit goes to Paris where Hemingway is just leaving with Fitzgerald on a car journey. Kit is invited along and the book documents the relationship between the two writers as well evoking the vitality of the era. A young lady called Bo also accompanies them and Kit falls in love with her, but she’s killed in an accident with a lorry.

The Last Glimpse of the title refers to the fact that the journey is a last glimpse of the writers of themselves, of how they used to be. As Zelda Fitzgerald indicates, although Kit loved Bo, he has his future ahead of him. All people of Hemingways’s and Fitzgeralds’s age can love is themselves as they used to be.