Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations

Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations is a 623 page volume of annotations by Miriam B. Mandel. As with her Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions (1995), it is uniformly and superlatively edited. Although the price of the volume may turn all but the most committed Hemingway reader away, libraries should consider three questions: How much attention should be given to the prose of Hemingway? What is the relationship of Hemingway to Spain and things Spanish? How complete is Mandel’s book?

It would be easy to overlook Death in the Afternoon; most of us think of...