The Garden of Eden

Rating:
Summary: a late masterpiece
Review: The Garden of Eden is one of Hemingway's unpublished manuscripts. Though he worked on it for something like fifteen years, he never completed it, or at least to his satisfaction. But even in its 'incomplete' state, it is one of my favorite books. I can only imagine what it would have been like had he lived long enough to finish it to his satisfaction--another The Sun Also Rises perhaps. Still, even though the manuscript claims to be incomplete it has a solid flow of story, and pretty polished off. And while the ending isn't typically Hemingway, it is a strong ending. In fact, there isn't much about this book that is typical Hemingway. It's much closer and much more complex than the other Hemingway pieces I've read. It's more emotional. The prose flows more and has a lyrical quality. It's a sensuous story of love, sex, emotion, and madness. It's not the first Hemingway I'd start with, but definitely one of the first few you should read. It will help solidify your respect for the author.

Rating:
Summary: Hemingway's Hidden Thoughts
Review: This is the Hemingway he did not want you to know about. This is the Hemingway He prefered unpublished. In "The Garden of Eden" Hemingway takes all his fantasies, including his sexual ones, and writes them on paper. If you are interested in what made Hemingway tick in his relationships read several biographies and then read this book. You will recognise a lot: same hair styles, multiple partners, love triangles, role switching, even love language. This is Hemingway's truest biography, even though he labeled it as fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Mediterranean menage a trois
Review: In this posthumous Hemingway novel, David Bourne, a talented young author who has just published his second novel to much acclaim, is on an extended honeymoon with his bride Catherine traveling throughout various hot spots on the Mediterranean. They're American, of course, and to Hemingway the best way to be American is to spend as much time as possible in Europe. As the title implies, the setting of David and Catherine's romantic idyll is nothing short of paradise, a splendor of leisure, food, and drink -- and there is indeed a lot of drinking.

One day Catherine returns to the hotel where she and David are staying with her hair cut short as a boy's; this simple but suggestive act precipitates a flurry of homoerotic innuendoes that pervade the remainder of the novel. At Cannes they meet a beautiful European girl named Marita who is attracted -- sexually -- to both of them, as they are to her. She becomes their traveling companion and, with everybody's consent, makes love to Catherine and then to David, but not, I'm afraid, at the same time. If this menage a trois is supposed to represent the Fall, with Marita playing the role of the Serpent, it seems that Paradise is not yet lost.

As a writer, David (like his creator) lets his life become his work, and he is currently inspired to write a story about elephant hunting with his father in Africa, a reminiscence of a transformative boyhood event. Catherine, an idle and apparently rich girl with no professional aspirations of her own except to char herself to a crisp getting the darkest tan she can, is jealous of his work and the authorial attention he gets; Marita, also rich (Catherine frequently calls her Heiress), is more sympathetic to David's intense artistic nature. He is clearly too narcissistic to be in love with anybody but himself and his own work, and being married to him means having to accept that, which may be too much of a sacrifice for Catherine to make.

Hemingway's trademark is that he makes his characters so complex precisely by having them say so little. The dialogue here is laconic and breezy, as though verbosity would be tedious in a place of such beauty and with people so blithe and lax. The easy, free flow of the narrative, giving the impression of having been written on autopilot, belies the fact that Hemingway spent the last fifteen years of his life working on this novel sporadically, evidently putting a tremendous amount of consideration into the statement he wanted to make. Like most of his statements, it bears his unmistakable stamp of restlessness and of impatience with the normal course of the world.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful, unflinching tale of love
Review: I enjoyed every page of this book, especially the last line. A lot of reviewers come down hard on it, but as is, much better than most fiction you'll ever read. You just have to take it as it comes, as the protagonist David Bourne does throughout the novel. Herein Hemingway offers no pat explanation of love, fidelity, etc, he just relishes the fine art of living and reveals the true cost of being in love. Not erotic in the sense of explicit sex scenes, but erotic in its very content, especially for the time period it is set in (post WWI, I believe), examining the roles people play within a relationship. An excellent read--you won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: A SEXY MODERN NOVEL THAT'S REFRESHINGLY DIFFERENT
Review: A posthumous work, possibly Hemingway's finest achievment. This tender love story about a torrid triangular relationship is unlike any of his better known books. A surprisingly modern novel in which the famously 'macho' author gets in touch with his feminine side, it caused quite a stir in literary circles when first published in 1986. Not least for its erotic hedonistic content.
Set in the early 1920s, young lovers David Bourne, a writer, and his beautiful wife Catherine are enjoying an idyllic honeymoon on the French Mediterranean coast ... until David decides it's time to get back to work again on his next book. Fun-loving Catherine, a bit of a rebellious wildchild at heart, soon begins to resent her husband's writerly solitude. When he shuts himself away alone in his study to work (unfortunately, it's what us writers have to do!) she starts to go recklessly out of control. Catherine's suppressed bisexual feelings begin to surface, as does her self-destructive nature and worsening mental condition. As Catherine starts to explore her sexuality, she involves David in a dangerous erotic game with another young woman she herself is attracted to and is willing to share with her man.
David is a more sensitive male protagonist than the archetypal strong, silent main characters of Hemingway's other fiction; without a war, maybe this is why. Catherine, who is living on the edge of madness, is a lot like that other damaged Catherine (Barkley) in A Farewell To Arms. The romantic Provence setting is enchanting and makes you want to visit the tiny seaport village of le Grau du Roi; I did, actually, but found it disappointingly touristy (as most famous places in fiction are apt to be nowadays) and is no longer the quiet, sleepy, undiscovered Eden depicted in the novel. Hemingway himself honeymooned there with his second wife Pauline and the events in the story are based loosely on his memories of this Mediterranean trip.
The Garden of Eden was a labour of love for Hemingway, a novel he worked on on-and-off over the last 15 years of his life between other books that were published such as The Old Man and the Sea. Some critics who have read the entire unfinished manuscript at the John F Kennedy Library were unhappy with the way it was whittled down in shape to a third of its original size for the final published version. Others, like myself, who haven't yet viewed the manuscript, think Scribners editor Tom Jenks did a wonderful job cutting and condensing to make it such a beautiful book. That 'one true sentence' Hemingway strove so hard to write has never been so apparent as in this deceptively simple sparse prose. Easy to read is hard to write, trust me, and I'm in constant awe of what Hemingway has managed to achieve with this, his greatest work, I feel.
Lastly, did you know that the unedited manuscript also followed the story of another young couple, whose lives intertwined with David and Catherine? Nick Sheldon, a painter, and his wife Barbara, who were living in a small rented flat in Paris; they were modelled on Hemingway and his first wife Hadley. These other two central characters probably got the chop because their storyline wasn't developed enough - or perhaps the story didn't work as well with them in it. Who knows? Maybe one day Scribners will publish the original manuscript in its entirety. I hope so, but doubt it. Just be thankful for what we do have.

Rating:
Summary: Uncover this
Review: It is a great book. We're talking about Hemingway here, so the style is wonderful. But the story is the most interesting story. It's very complex but well worth it.

Rating:
Summary: truely touching book
Review: one of the best fiction books I`ve ever read. This was my first Hemingway`s book, I picked it up randomly in a library while waiting a computer access, read the first 2 pages, took it at home and couldnt stop reading it up until 3 AM, truly fascinating, it touched me so deeply.

Rating:
Summary: tender, twisted, beautiful
Review: I became a writer largely out of love and admiration for Ernest Hemingway. Old Man and the Sea is his best in my opinion, but this one is my favorite. So much of Hemingway's work is loosely autobiographical, so many protagonists modeled after himself. But in his earlier works, when he gets to the deepest parts of these men, he pulls back, or shies away with emotional distance or some other kind of evasion. There is no such evasion in the Garden of Eden. This book is his most vulnerable, tender and humbling portrait of so many of the central struggles of his life.

It is difficult to separate Hemingway the man from Hemingway the writer and for that matter Hemingway the character in his own writing. He encouraged them to be confused in his own way during his life and was a major contributor to the blossoming of our current culture of celebrity obsession. So it's not invalid in my opinion to read his work as part of the greater story of his life and find meaning in it from that perspective.

In this book, Hemingway finally takes on some of the painful issues of his life. There's a great deal of sexual intrigue in The Garden of Eden, specifically about gender and identity. David and Catherine, the two main characters, do some fascinating and disturbing play with their genders and their relationship with each other as a man and a woman. A lot of people have theorized that one of the contributing factors to Hemingway's suicide had to do with his conflicted sexuality which he hid for most of his life. As a child he was raised as a girl until the age of four or five by his mother who had wanted a daughter. Aside from that, there was a history of cross dressing in his family, which also tragically played out in a subsequent generation with Hemingway's son Gregory AKA Gloria.

We see him delve into one of the great traumas of his writing life -- when his wife (was is Pauline or Hadley?) lost an entire suitcase full of his writing including all the carbon copies, in the middle to early part of his career. This incident is replayed in this novel and dealt with on a much deeper level than is mentioned in a Moveable Feast.

We are also able to see in The Garden of Eden a more complex heroine and a more fragile and intertwined relationship than is presented in any of Hemingway's other works. This again is another major issue of Hem's life story -- why was he married 5 times? what were these relationships like and what was it about him and each of the women that contributed to this? Though The Garden doesn't give any answers, it is fascinating to see the questions touched upon and explored in a more honest and vulnerable way than in his other work.

It is true that this novel is disturbing. I wouldn't describe reading it as a feel-good experience. But after a while, feel-good experiences become a little one note and this is something more interesting. There is an exquisite kind of mourning and desolation that runs through this book, and yet at the same time some of his most voluptuous writing about food and sex and his surroundings. The tension is breathtaking, yet at the same time heartwrenching as you can almost feel it all becoming too much for him.

I love this book. It is in my top ten of all time. And I know almost everyone would disagree with me, but I think this book is more than worth reading. It's a precious final window into the soul of one of the greatest writers of our time.

ps. A caveat: Read a couple other Hemingway novels before you read this one, if you haven't.

Rating:
Summary: A Book About Eating Lunch
Review: This is the story about a man and two women, what they eat for lunch everyday, and what they drink. Hemingway, his mind shot, has become a food and wine critic. He did a lot of that in "Across the River and into the Trees," but in "Garden of Eden" it's even worse; it's the whole book -- except that, after his characters have lunch, they do go for a swim (all the time). The main character, David, also takes a lot of showers.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, engaging, but little lasting impact.
Review: The first posthumously published book I've read of Hemingway, it was an interesting side of him to read. Just a little naughty, without the slightest hint of perversity, Hemingway tackles this complicated situation with skill and precision. It's not the story of a swinger. It's the story of a regular guy trying to make sense of the unusual situation he has become entangled in.