The Wildest Sun
This is a Bildungsroman—a novel of education and formation of character—as our narrator, a French teenager named Delphine Auber, helpfully informs us. Tragedy drives Delphine out of postwar Paris and propels her on an educational odyssey, first to Harlem, then to Havana, and finally back to France again as a fully formed adult and successful author.
She holds fast to the dream of being a writer throughout the many vicissitudes she suffers during this sprawling, romantic novel. Delphine has always believed that she is the love child of her bohemian, alcoholic mother, a poet, and Ernest Hemingway, conceived during Hemingway’s Moveable Feast years. To know him, to be acknowledged as his daughter, is another dream of Delphine’s.
Unlike David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, Delphine is not to be trusted. Trading on her apparent charm, for she’s not beautiful, as well as her youthful writing skills, she’s actually an ingrate, a thief, an arsonist, and possibly a murderess. She is capable of friendship, however, and some of the best parts of the novel recount her relationships with Louise, a Parisian nun; Teddy, a New York starlet; and Elián, a well-connected young Cuban.
Established in Havana in the late Forties, Delphine stalks Hemingway, finally makes his acquaintance … and what happens? Is she or isn’t she? By the conclusion of the Bildungsroman, it doesn’t even matter anymore, for without his help she stands on her own writerly feet.
Delphine’s “A Star is Born” story occasionally seems predictable. But somehow by the triumphant ending, Asha Lemmie (a bit of a young literary phenomenon herself) and Delphine have managed to charm their way into all but the least susceptible of hearts.
