Across the River and into the Trees

Rating:
Summary: A warm, sad smile
Review: People always say "It wasn't his best." True, but then "not his best" is far better than most. A simple yet, as with all Hemingway stories, deeply complex and aching look at life near its end. If you like Hemingway and appreciate his style, read the book with open heart and mind. It will put a warm, sad smile on your face

Rating:
Summary: Like an iceberg, 90% of its substance is there but unseen
Review: Romantic, finely constructed, delicate, real, touching. A good Hemingway novel. Good story of the relationship between a talented and very capable commander broken down by war and a young, well-off, intelligent woman. She does not try to destroy him. Hemingway spent a lot of time creating good titles for his works. They are not mere labels but an integral part of the whole, i.e. "Big Two-Hearted River," "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and The Sun Also Rises. The title enhances each of these and the work would be lessened if the title were something else. Likewise, Across the River and Through the Trees.

Rating:
Summary: hermosamente escrito
Review: si ya lo se, hemingway era parco en sus oraciones, pero este libro es de una hermosura exquisita aunque a algunas personas lo encuentren soso y sin trama definida. la trama es lo menos importante en este libro.son las emociones que genera, el encuentro del amor tardio, como el lector se interesa en la trama y se va envolviendo con los personajes, con el futil atento de el de amar aun cuando su cuerpo esta desgastado. a mi particularmente me encanto y hasta me lo encontre demasiado dulce para un escritor como hemingway acostumbrado a obras algo mas que secas y desprovistas de sentimientos o llenas de violencia. muy recomendado, les va a gustar ver a hemingway en otro aspecto de escritor.

LUIS MENDEZ

[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: She Loves You
Review: That this book is perhaps the least popular of Hemingway's output is the condition which proves the point. This, maybe the most personal and certainly most melancholy of his novels, is the story of a middle aged colonel who struggles to recapture a time, a place, when the world was not yet so... what's the word... stupid? Maybe that's too rough. Tasteless? Lacking in humor? In color? The protagonist's affair with a much younger woman has no doubt damaged this novel's reputation in the context of said cultural environment, but I don't see how one can understand The Sun Also Rises or Farewell to Arms while being left cold by this particular one. (Hemingway blew his brains out on July 2, 1961. The Beatles 'Mop Top' haircut was born during a trip to Paris at around that same time, and this enabled the singers to shake their heads to the beat of She Loves You with much improved effectiveness, while millions of young women fainted from exhiliration.)

Rating:
Summary: An underrated, understated, underread, underappreciated book
Review: The book is not Hemingway's best effort, and consequently has a reputation of being a mediocre, thinly-disguised autobiographical sketch. The parallels with Hemingway's real life are obvious: The hero is an American WWI vet who returns to Venice at midcentury and falls in love with a much younger woman. But so what? Aren't writers told to "write what they know"? The criticisms of this book chiefly stem from the fact that Hemingway wrote others that were better. But, judged on its own, it is an enjoya

Rating:
Summary: A fine effort, but it falls short
Review: The plot line is absurd: a 50 year old, war-ravaged, American colonel has an 18-year old girlfriend, a beautiful Italian countess who loves him unquestioningly. His health is failing so they spend their time together ever-conscious of approaching death. He has neither beauty, nor money, nor power, nor any great charm; he himself does not fully understand why she loves him so deeply. Nor do we.
An absurd storyline can be accepted provided the author lays sufficient basis for it. Unfortunately Hemingway fails to provide us with enough reason why the girl would see past the great differences in their lives. Very near the end of the book, Hemingway tells us "that the girl loved him because he had never been sad one waking morning of his life". The statement has great promise for divining the meaning of the rest of the book, but the author fails to tell us, expressedly or impliedly, anything else about this idea.
Hence, the girl never becomes anything more than a fantasy figure. She does not take shape as a separate person. We know her only in terms of her love for the colonel. Their conversation has an endearing, gentle quality to it, but it gives little clues as to the girl's feelings and motivations.
However, the story has an autumnal mood that can be moving at times. Hemingway's prose captures the cold Venetian wind, the long slow gondola rides, the bitter hunting mornings. Venice seems at once the most poetic and lovely city in the world. Nevertheless, the story fails to overcome the reader's skepticism.

Rating:
Summary: a mess
Review: This book is really biographical and psychological to Hemingway. Which is why critics slammed the book, but I feel its unwarranted. The story (which critics say is implausible, which confuses me as today we have people meeting on the internet and getting married) is about a middle-aged General-demoted to Colonel Richard Cantwell and his relationship with an Italian woman Renata.
Its biographical in that it recounts a love affair Hemingway really had with Adriana Ivancich and its psychological because it explains how growing old damages one's psyche as he realizes life is becoming a physical hardship and questions whether he can make that transition from being a strong-willed man full of machismo to and aging ever growing weaker man who will never reach that stature again. Why the scope is narrower than Hemingway's previous work of fiction published, it contains some of his best written passages and his own insecurities about his life. I can understand why it's slated but I hope other understand why I like it.

Rating:
Summary: I understand why it's slated but still....
Review: This book is really biographical and psychological to Hemingway. Which is why critics slammed the book, but I feel its unwarranted. The story (which critics say is implausible, which confuses me as today we have people meeting on the internet and getting married) is about a middle-aged General-demoted to Colonel Richard Cantwell and his relationship with an Italian woman Renata.
Its biographical in that it recounts a love affair Hemingway really had with Adriana Ivancich and its psychological because it explains how growing old damages one's psyche as he realizes life is becoming a physical hardship and questions whether he can make that transition from being a strong-willed man full of machismo to and aging ever growing weaker man who will never reach that stature again. Why the scope is narrower than Hemingway's previous work of fiction published, it contains some of his best written passages and his own insecurities about his life. I can understand why it's slated but I hope other understand why I like it.

Rating:
Summary: War is not good for you
Review: This is a beautifully told short novel about a human spirit brutalized by war. Our colonel looks in the mirror and does not like what he sees: the face shaped by war. A part of him loves Venice, Italian art, American trees and, very much, his beloved. And it is tormented by the reflection in the mirror. He carries this pain all through the book, trying to alleviate it with a drink every few pages. He apologizes to civilians after addressing them in a brusque battleground manner. The emotional pain is reinforced by pain physical, which he is quenching with double doses of extra strength medicine. This multifaceted suffering is weighing on him. The slow steady pace of his thoughts stretching over long passages is only temporarily interrupted by the reviving rapid-fire "he said she said" dialogue with Renata. Beautiful Renata loves him for "never having been sad", for not being weighed down by his life. Meanwhile he mostly sees in himself a soldier, foreign to magnificent Venice, to peacetime civilians and in some ways to his love herself.

The book evokes a painting suggesting a picture much larger than its frame. Beyond the frame lies his past, the history of his relationship with the countess, the development of his friendships with the Venetians and much more. It leaves an impression of a story told reluctantly: even our colonel's name we learn only on page 81. And yet the book finely portrays the profound sadness of war's dehumanizing effect. In this respect Ricardo is somewhat closer to Seymour from "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" than to Paul Bäumer from "All Quiet on the Western Front". The only complaint is about the primary colors: love and death, youth and old age, Beauty and the Brute. Hence 4 stars.

Pain remains the book's leitmotif. The war is what kills our colonel, but more importantly the war is the ordeal with which he lives. War kills something inside even the best of us. This is a good thing to remember, especially in our age of building coalitions of the willing and appeals to support our wars.

Rating:
Summary: Hemingway's and 20th century's most underrated novel
Review: This is a book meant, like most of Hemingway, to be read slowly. Originally received with mixed reviews, now unhesitatingly dismissed, it is his most culturally rich, most allusionistic, most finely structured novel. And the one most subject to crude and hasty misinterpretation. Some of the chapters read as beautifully as the finest short stories, though the cynicism and wisdom of age now simmers and seathes beneath them. In old Europe where the May-September marriage is not considered perverse, where smug American market-aggression and cultural vacuity are givens, where the destruction of the war still (then) dominates everyone's daily reality, where the loss of the WW II generation - though less celebrated - was far more devastating; in other words, where the contextual fits and insights are better appreciated, this book fits and comprehensively glows. It is his best on art history and culture, on mortality, on bureaucracy and antiestablishmentarianism, rich (som! etimes prophetic) in military history and political contemporaneity, and dotted with numerous literary judgments, often savage in the Colonel's self-educated bombast (but not contraty to Hemingway's beliefs). The schizoid extremes of the Colonel constitute Hemingway's perhaps most profound personal portrait anywhere; the dawning intelligence, quiet dignity, and intelligent denials of Renata are anything but "accommodating cardboard female," as so many are wont to hastily claim. The cross generational allegory and the very concern about how generations feed each other lie well beyond the ken of wise-a** critics and p-c faddists, but ring sadly relevant to the displacement we see so clearly now fifty years later. An extremely well structured, beautifully descriptive, at times savagely satirical, but sadly lonely book set in historically mystic and unapologetically byzantine, old-tough Venice - after modern war. It is the acculturated- (though unpolished-), survivin! g-warrior sequel to For Whom the Bell Tolls, wiser now in t! he bombed out European aftermath. It is personal and universal at the same time in its profound regret, deep reverence for life, and cantankerous but accepting self assessment. Read it slowly, carefully, luxuriatingly. Innure yourself against the colonel's cliche's and bluster (he is not a fancy speech former, but he is groping after central value and meaning, however suspect in post modern parlance), consider Renata more carefully than nations raised on Hollywood's idiotic icons can - see HER management of Cantwell - and you will come away breathless, knowing the only thing that prevents you from getting more out of the book is the time you wish to allow before reading it again. The elegaic, autumnal beauty alone will bring the poetic reader back.