conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled Hemingway's Chair about Martin, Hemingway, English--first with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary? Start with the sentence 'A quiet, unassuming postman develops an unexpected obsession in this quiet, unassuming--and very English--first novel from the author of Monty Python fame'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A quiet, unassuming postman develops an unexpected obsession in this quiet, unassuming--and very English--first novel from the author of Monty Python fame. Martin Sproale is the very model of a modern Walter Mitty. An assistant postmaster in the coastal town of Threston, he lives at home with his mother and rides his bicycle to work each day. It's a pleasant but uneventful sort of life, marked only by Martin's growing fascination with the life, works, and personal style of Ernest Hemingway. "Tea-drinkers, mothers, post office administrators, would-be fiances. Little people with little minds," Martin thinks. "When would they realise that only through confrontation with danger could life be lived to the full?" Martin has transformed his room into a kind of Hemingway shrine, complete with bullfighting poster, several first editions, the same kind of typewriter Papa used--even a vintage WWI Italian army first-aid cabinet filled with all the liquors he liked to drink.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first two paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hemingway's Chair
  Then her eye was taken by the medical cabinet and she asked him about it and he told her it was from a hospital in Milan and it was of the same design and vintage as the one in the American Red Cross Hospital where the nineteen-year-old Hemingway fell in love with his nurse Agnes Von Kurowsky.
  She whistled at this and asked if it still had period bandages and eighty-year-old iodine inside. Before he could stop her she had pulled at the enamel catch. As the door swung open she stood back, visibly impressed. 'Now that's one hell of a bar.'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The drawing room door swung open. Mrs Harvey-Wardrell saw Martin Sproale bent double over the Turkish carpet.
  Mrs Harvey-Wardrell sat herself on the edge of a chaise longue and Martin noticed for the first time that she had rather good legs. She crossed them elegantly, absently fingered the pearls that hung down over the top of an expensive angora jersey and indicated Martin to sit as well.
  She listened to him with the same expression he had seen in pictures of white missionaries in Africa. Earnest and slightly distracted.
  At the word 'leading' Mrs Harvey-Wardrell had shown momentary interest. Now her eyes narrowed suspiciously.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs? End with the sentence ' Extract from Hemingway's letter to John Dos Passos dated February 13, 1936, on page 27, held at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia, is reproduced by kind permission of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Inside the envelope was a folded page of notepaper. As she opened it a tighter, less scrupulously folded enclosure slipped out. She bent to the floor, retrieved it and began to smooth it out on the table. It was torn from a newspaper. A story spread over the whole page, beneath the headline 'Key West Celebration Ends On High Note.' 'As the Hemingway Days Festival drew to a close after a riotuous week, it was generally agreed that this year's winner of the Papa Look-Alike competition was the best ever. English newcomer Martin Sproale could have fooled the family.'
  To prove it there was a photograph alongside. It was uncanny. The beard, the build, the tight white T-shirt and the creased khaki shorts, the stance, the set of the eye and the jut of the jaw. She knew it so well.
  Ruth did not need to read the letter. She laid it on the table and stared out the window of her cottage to the airless, browning fields beyond.
  The goings-on in this story are entirely fictional, and none of the characters, outside of Hemingway's world, ever existed. The names of the companies mentioned, both solvent and insolvent, are also fictional.
  Extracts from Hemingway's published works, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) © 1940 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1968 by Mary Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) © 1952 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1980 by Mary Hemingway, and A Moveable Feast (1964) © 1964 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1992 by John H. Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway, are reproduced by kind permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster. Extract from Hemingway's letter to John Dos Passos dated February 13, 1936, on page 27, held at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia, is reproduced by kind permission of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.