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Across The River And Into The Trees

Across The River And Into The Trees

List Price: $13.00
Your Price: $9.75
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
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: 4 stars
Summary: Across the River and into the Trees
Review: Interesting fact: The Hotel that the Colonel occupies in this noval is a real hotel called the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice Italy, where rooms go for as much as 3,000 euros per night. The hotel was also built in 1525.


Althought this was not the best work that I have read by Ernest Hemingway it is certainly a great noval. The story is of an "old" American Colonel who is revisiting the places in Europe that he believes has shaped his character and personality. The noval is set towards the end of World War Two. The Colonel fought in World War One and did much of his growing up on the battle field. When he goes to Venice, he meets up with his "last and true and only love", a young Venician Contessa named Renata. He is old enough to be her father, but they are madly in love. Her youthful exhuberence tends to revive him in his failing health as he is suffering from a sevier heart condition. She loves him with all of her heart and Hemingway's simple writing style takes the reader away from the somber tone of the actual situation to a more romantic genre. Even if Hemingway is supposed to be the "man's man" in literature, this noval is the closest thing that I have read to a love story without it being written from the perspective of women. It shows a man who is in the twilight of his life and who has learned to really appreciate the finer things that this world has to offer. Things such as a fine city or wine, or an expensive cut of meat and delicious cheese; even more important though is the beautiful young girl that adores him so much and that he loves in return. Personaly I enjoyed the book very much and I would recomend it to anyone who likes Hemingway's works.

Rating: 5 stars
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: 3 stars
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: 2 stars
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: 4 stars
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: 5 stars
Summary: Perspective Required
Review: This was surprisingly my favorite Hemingway story in recent years. Readers in search of the typical bravado, bullfights and war scenes will be in for a shock. The dialogue between the main characters is really what drives this.

The novel is about the story of an army colonel finding the love of his life too late to enjoy her. It contains the bittersweet pain of a premature ending that all will know comes too soon. Both the colonel and his young countess realize they are on borrowed time, and Hemingway shares the pain with his readers. The foreshadowing is reminiscent of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" although it is not an action oriented novel per say.

Also touching is the undertone of a loving friendship built between the colonel and the staff at his favorite hotel. There too, the dialogue is at it's finest. You can read the care between old comrades, and feel the spirit of their kinship.

Read it expecting romantic dialogue intertwined with the pains of love, and you will enjoy it. Read it looking for the big game hunting or submarine search and you'll be disappointed.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Perspective Required
Review: Those that have not experienced the military cannot connect with this novel. The Sun Also Rises, glorified in later years by Hunter S. Thompsons nearly identical work, popularized even recently by Johnny Depp and Hollywood, absolutely pales in comparison to the insights relevant to geo-political irony captured by H. while a correspondent in WWII. The colonels' recollection of the recalcitrant command's decisions ring as true today as they did in the 40's. This book, despite the requisite theme of unrequited love, is by far the most poignant of his works. The love story is almost an excuse to write this novel; those that think H. was past his prime simply haven't been there to experience the intrinsic theme of the horrible irony and idiocy of military command. The good colonel's attempts to minimize loss of life while performing his ordered mission present the problems of command in some of the most eloquent terms. Do twenty years in the infantry and read this novel again if you find it inferior to the fluff of "The Sun Also Rises"

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An unexpected gem
Review: THough not one of Hemingway's greatest works, this seldolm talked about book of Hemingway is almost a classic, and was 20 times better than i expected it to be. A symbolic tale representing both the ideals of carpe diem and of Hemingway's cries for peace not war. THe story tells the tale of a dying officer, a graduate of VMI, who has lost all of his laurels after a failed attack in which he only followed orders and watched his own men be butchered. THe story, spanning only 24 hours, follows this dying, flawed man as he finds his last and truest love at the moment that it is almost too late. The colonel represents the dying of a kind, but old Ernest instructs us to cease life while we can. THough not Hemingway's absolute best, this is a must read for all serious literary fans.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Poignant, powerful minimalism
Review: When Hemingway wrote this novel, he may have known that his materpieces were behind him. Although this novel is a lesser work, there are moments of tenderness, poignancy and power crafted in his trademark miminalist style that linger. The novel concerns a retired Army Colonel, who has fought in brutal combat, near the end of his life and is desperately in love with a much younger woman. To me the woman signified the Colonel's lost youth and the relationship may take on new meaning if one views it as such. The Colonel looks backward in the novel to the horror and futility of war, which serves as a contrast to the extreme tenderness of his last love affair in Venice. Hemingway's experiences during the Spanish Civil War and in Paris during World War II give him much to draw upon in this literary "moveable feast," which soubriquet first appears here. Against the harshness of his existence the Colonel has retreated to Italian duck blinds, Venice in winter and the adoring young beauty of his life. One senses that at this time in his life, so near the end, that Hemingway sees his own life's lapse into finality in lines from Stonewall Jackson's dying moments to cross peacefully over the river and into the trees. Hemingway is a master of dialogue and there is much between the Colonel and his young mistress to savor. I recommend that you read Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms and/or For Whom the Bell Tolls before taking on this novel. If you admire and have widely read Hemingway already, then this is a very fine but not great novel relative to his masterpieces. This is a compelling, accessible novel which subtleties will linger and perhaps the greatest aspect of the genius of his craft is that he never fails to have this same powerful impact.


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