Across the River and into the Trees

Rating:
Summary: Angrymofo's Earlier Review Says it Best..Don't miss it!!
Review: ..All I can humbly add to Angrymofo is that I recall one of the best descriptions by EH (or anyone for that matter), is that of going "Into (and thru) the Trees" with the Old Soldier and his young and faithful attache driving an old jeep, and there all of a sudden,focusing into view, is the city of Venice, almost an oriental jewel, becoming closer and closer. Among the best views of this great city as I've read (including Mann's "Death in Venice")...Even if the novel is a bit of a self-parable it's worth while, though not among the Hemingway greats!

Rating:
Summary: Deservedly regarded as one of Hemingway¿s lesser efforts
Review: Across the River and into the Trees is the story of an ill American colonel in post war Venice. He is "half-a hundred" years old and suffering from an incurable heart condition. He has an 18-year-old girlfriend. She is a wealthy Italian countess who likes to have sex with him in the back of a gondola on freezing cold nights... Yeah, right.

If you can get past the absurdity of this central conceit there are some good points in this novel. There is a lovingly detailed description of Venice. If you've been there you will recognize the places Hemingway describes. There is a long account of duck hunting on a frozen marsh that is quite true to life. The forgotten tense situation in post-war Trieste, with the United States expecting a Soviet invasion at any moment, is convincingly presented. Hemingway also presents his unflinching opinions on some of great figures of World War II in Europe.

Unfortunately the whole is not very good. The dialogue between the dying colonel and the teenage countess is painfully malapropos. His buddy-buddy relationship with the hotel workers at the Gritti Palace seems contrived. Worth reading only if you want to read every word the great man wrote.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: Again, I see why Ernest Hemingway is adored by so many. This story of an old Army Colonel in love with a wealthy young woman is quite moving. The realism is excellent. I won't give the book away but the emotional depth of this book is outstanding. I would recommend this book not only to Hemingway readers but to all those hopeless romantics out there.

Rating:
Summary: Moving
Review: Almost all of Hemingway's tales include the loss of love, hope, and/or life. His novels are very well written but can be depressing. This novel was written in his later years and I think the hard-lived colonel it details is a depiction of Hemingway himself. He must have felt that his life was soon over and he learned to love at all the wrong times. The book was excellent however and did a worthy job of capturing average simple conversions in a colloquial type of manner.

Rating:
Summary: A down book for Hem
Review: Easily Hemingway's worst book. After For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940, Hemingway spent most of the 40s drinking more heavily than usual. In the late 40s he spent two or three years hanging about Venice with northern Italian upper crust types and was infatuated with a girl of about 21. He decided to write about this episode of his life and blend that story with the fact that he was closing in on a half-century in age. Result- disaster. The best thing about this novel is that Hemingway's pride was hurt by the withering storm of bad reviews from the critics. He wrote the gem The Old Man and the Sea a couple of years later and redeemed himself.

Rating:
Summary: wkrc wcpo cpo
Review: Ectopic probe? Do you feel the ladies pain? I mean the tingle
signal.. What is ectopic about Jones at 6?

If the case is plucking of the omental fascia by crt or flat screen
I believe in that old Entrez Pub Med sortie.

Is your artemis yahoo posed in a fullerene eeg echelon mine field?

The floating tachycardia tachyon within information exchange for
extortion for the acquisition or acquisition of appearance of
economic gain .... the Anfinsen patch... the graft

From the lower left of the screen?

Some device that sucks human protoplasm? Oh krc... that is
something you can talk about? Remember you will be extorting
the press you are responsible to? Grips coming for
protoplasm suckers out of Montauk.

Don't feel inchoate that I disprove of you.

Rating:
Summary: Strange at first, but very good nonetheless.
Review: Exactly what sort of book would one expect from a writer who had just written "For Whom the Bell Tolls"? I don't know either, but probably not this hushed, elegiac novel. It's not the brooding melancholy of "Across the River and Into the Trees" itself that's surprising - it's that the book contains no action and no climax of pretty much any sort, and that it still manages to be so good.

Essentially, the book is the restless consciousness of one Richard Cantwell, Colonel in the United States Army, veteran of two world wars, recipient of many grave wounds, who is travelling through Europe one last time to shoot some ducks, meet some old friends, and spend a couple of days with his last, real and only love, a nineteen-year-old (!) countess named Renate. The book is aptly titled - it flows like a quiet old river, slowly but surely and a bit sadly. Like many a Hemingway hero, Cantwell is stuck with an empty existence, a profession he doesn't much care for, and awareness of both of the above. Love Renate though he does, he lives in the past, constantly reliving this and that battle, moving imaginary troops one minute, then wondering about the meaning of it all the next.

Renate herself is the least realistic of all Hemingway women, and as a female lead she's poor indeed. That is not, however, the way she should be seen. She is described as having almost unworldly gentleness and purity, an enormous contrast to the colonel (esp. given her youth). In a way, she becomes almost a symbol of the youth the colonel has irrevocably lost, an epitome of everything he missed out on - and the stories of the battles he tells her become almost like religious confessions. In the end, Cantwell ruefully realizes that he cannot tell her everything, that she could not possibly understand all the sorrows he suffered and never was freed from, that he thus cannot be redeemed, and the book ends on a funereal note.

Lack of action notwithstanding, the poignant, honest self-analysis and wistful tone make this book beautiful in the same way a stately, quiet funeral dirge is. Cantwell is likely Hemingway's most autobiographical character - indeed, we get further inside his head than we did in Jake Barnes's, or Robert Jordan's, or Harry Morgan's - and probably well reflects Hemingway's own state of mind at the time. In the long mental soliloquys about politics, Europe, war and life in general, the line between author and character disappears. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine an American officer (of such rank) thinking in such terms - no, this is Hemingway himself, writing down his thoughts and feelings and donning a colonel's uniform for the occasion. And if you felt like that, you might well have come to the same conclusion the author did.

Rating:
Summary: a mess
Review: hard to say this: but it just doesn't work. i'm a big-time ernie fan, but this should never have been published. i think at this point in his life he'd been in too many plane crashes and sustained too many concussions. i suggest you read some of the other books like THE SUN AlSO RISES or FAREWELL TO ARMS, or the short stories. not everything the great man wrote was great, but that's okay; it's acceptable. after all, he was only human. yes, even ernest hemingway. just my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Simply terrible
Review: I am a big fan of Hemingway, and For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms are two of my favourite novels, but this book was simply terrible. Firstly, there was no plot. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing did. Secondly, the dialogues between Cantwell and Renata are boring and highly unrealistic. Realism has always been Hemingway's strength, but he seems to have lost it in this novel. And finally, the whole effect is extremely boring. There is no story, no action, no life.I couldn't wait for this book to end so that I could read something interesting instead. My advice to you is - read a lot of Hemingway, but don't touch this one.

Rating:
Summary: Foolish characters; a sad waste of literary talent
Review: I approached this novel with an open mind, considering that it had had bad reviews, and such reviews never are indicative of the quality and significance of a literary work. Having found Hemingway's novels (and his poetry) often superb and certainly riveting and entertaining, I was profoundly disappointed. This novel is slow reading. The main character, Cantwell, is fairly rude and egotistical, which makes it implausible that he should have a warm and loving relationship with anyone. The love interest -- Renata -- is moronic, even for an "inexperienced" nineteen year old. These two characters say I love you so often and in so many ways that it quickly becomes shallow and meaningless -- love is demonstrated, and that doesn't come across at all. Infatuation, perhaps, but never love. If you forget that this is a romance and focus on the mentality of an aging and terminally ill soldier, you get another view of the novel. It becomes even more tedious as Cantwell relates war story after war story. We've all endured this in real life, and in literature it is just as monotonous. The rudeness of Cantwell, his conceit over his little apres-war association of former comrades, the obsequiousness of the Italians, the complete lack of suspense, all make this a rather dull and insignificant read. The only saving grace is the character of Jackson, Cantwell's driver, who would have been a far better choice to be the protagonist of the novel, with us seeing all the behaviors of an aging warrior, his simpering acquaintances, and his silly girlfriend through his honest and contemporary perspective.