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Summary: Your heart goes wild, mad and broken.
Review: The best of the best. It beats into your heart and soul and all you ever wants to do is to run naked in warm sand or fly away in a lightblue buggatti. Go cut your hair. Get a suntan and let life go
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Summary: This novel was very intriging and hard to put down.
Review: The Garden of Eden was very erotic. It gave me a sense ofthrill to read it. The relationships between the characters aren'tyour ordinary run of the mill but with something a little different to intrigue my mind I was fascinated. Some things did get a little slow or repetitive but over all it was a book that was hard to put down.
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Summary: good
Review: This is goo
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Summary: Vintage Papa
Review: The best introduction to hemingway after 'the sun also rises', It take us into his view of life, and the role of the writer. it contains some of his finest prose. a triumph
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Summary: A complex love-triangle amidst a backdrop that is purely Hem
Review: It's hard to read this book without wanting a stiff drink,
some fine food, and a month or so to chill in a Spanish costal Villa.
It's dark, erotic, and offers some interesting insight into Hem's writing routine
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Summary: DON"T UNDERESTIMATE THIS ONE!
Review: A number of Hemingway's works were published afer his death. Some of them probably should have stayed where ever it was they were stashed. This is not one of them. I am not a big Hemingway novel fan, preferring his short stories. This is an exception though. This is a twisted story and does indeed have it's dark side. But, being obviously, at least partially autobigoraphical, it stands to reason that it would be rather quirky, as Hemingway himself was. In this work we see flashes of the old Hemingway, the young Hemingway and all of his brilliance. It is a far better work than some of his later stuff. I must admit to have read this one several times and it has become one of my favorite of his works. I remember putting if off for quite awhile, and am sorry I did as such. Recommend this one highly.
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Summary: Bizarre and Stark--in a good way!
Review: Very bizarre and disturbing love triangle drives the plot of this book, written in Hemingway's genius minimalistic writing style. Not my favorite Heminway, but worth the read regardless.
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Summary: Visit the estate and enter the garden...
Review: I recently had the opportunity to travel to Key West and visit the Hemingway estate. The tour guide talked about Hemingway being married and then his wife making a friend and soon after Hemingway was not married and with the ex-wife's friend. I think the tour guide said this happened more than once in the life of one of our most influential novelists.
Hmmm...I purchased Hemingway's The Garden of Eden and after reading it I couldn't stop myself from wondering if art truly does imitate life.
Caught between two loves on his honeymoon--one plot of this novel-- had me pondering all kinds of possibilities and brought me back to one of the oldest stories that exists to man...the story of temptation in the garden...and choices...outstanding Hemingway work, my favorite one.
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Summary: Provocative & Enticing
Review: On the surface, this tome may appear to be nothing more than a little love story of young American newlyweds set on the pristine beaches of France and Spain during the glamorous and decadent days of the 1920's. Well...yes..and no. Hemingway, to his credit, gives us a love story quite unlike any other Hemingway that you will ever read. It's not about bullfighting, war in Italy or Spain, catching an oversized fish only to lose it, or anything that most neophytes associate Hemingway with.
Hemingway, as is his custom, so masterfully creates the setting that you feel as if you are there on the white sandy beaches of France overlooking the majestic Mediterranean feeling the cool breeze while sipping one of David Bourne's mouthwatering martinis. Hemingway gives us the young aspiring couple, David & Catherine Bourne, who seemingly have begun a loving, if not somewhat banal, relationship.
Enter dark-skinned sultress Marita. From then on, the story takes a dramatic shift from a borderline hackneyed account of love into a steamy and provocative love triangle that makes for compelling and incredibly enjoyable reading. Perhaps due to the fact that it wasn't released until 1986, there exists a myriad of swear words and provocatively suggestive sexual scenes that no way would have made it into print earlier in Hemingway's life(e.g. the censorship of For Whom the Bell Tolls).
Overall, I found it to be an absolute great summer or fall book that will whisk you away to Hemingway's incomparable setting of lovers in paradise. Read it and ask yourself: Is this the real Hemingway hidden beneath the gruff exterior or is this merely an aberration? I believe the former. Read it and enjoy.
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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.
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