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Summary
Summary
The last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, published posthumously in 1986, charts the life of a young American writer and his glamorous wife who fall for the same woman.
A sensational bestseller when it appeared in 1986, The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman. "A lean, sensuous narrative...taut, chic, and strangely contemporary," The Garden of Eden represents vintage Hemingway, the master "doing what nobody did better" (R. Z. Sheppard, Time).
Author Notes
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in the family home in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1899. In high school, Hemingway enjoyed working on The Trapeze, his school newspaper, where he wrote his first articles. Upon graduation in the spring of 1917, Hemingway took a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star.
After a short stint in the U.S. Army as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy, Hemingway moved to Paris, and it was here that Hemingway began his well-documented career as a novelist. Hemingway's first collection of short stories and vignettes, entitled In Our Time, was published in 1925. His first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, the story of American and English expatriates in Paris and on excursion to Pamplona, immediately established him as one of the great prose stylists and preeminent writers of his time. In this book, Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation," thereby labeling himself and other expatriate writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford.
Other novels written by Hemingway include: A Farewell To Arms, the story, based in part on Hemingway's life, of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse; For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of an American who fought, loved, and died with the guerrillas in the mountains of Spain; and To Have and Have Not, about an honest man forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West. Non-fiction includes Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in East Africa; and A Moveable Feast, his recollections of Paris in the Roaring 20s. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novella, The Old Man and the Sea.
A year after being hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression, Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An edited version of a narrative abandoned by the Nobel laureate, The Garden of Eden is about a young American couple in Europe on an extended honeymoon. PW stated that while the manuscript is of scholarly interest, it does not hold up as a ``bona fide Hemingway novel.'' (September) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Said to be the last of the major posthumous novels, The Garden of Eden was begun in 1946, worked on sporadically over the years, and left voluminous but incomplete when its author died in 1961. Edited now for publication (it has been cut to a third of its original length), the book reveals itself, for all the torment we know to have lain in the life beneath, to be slight, stiffly unevocative, and painfully mannered. Young writer David Bourne and his wife of three weeks, Catherine Hill (both are Americans, and Catherine is rich) are vacationing in the south of France as they wait for reviews of David's second book (the reviews are good; the book will make money). Trouble begins, though, when Catherine gets her hair cropped and wants to be a boy, especially in bed (""____________________________________?"" she says to Bourne). He does mind, but rather inexplicably does nothing about it. As Catherine becomes even more risk-taking and unstable, she creates a mÉnagÉ à trois by introducing into the leisured household the beautiful Marita, who has, all too conveniently for narrative purposes, fallen in love at first sight with David. The three try to pretend that life is intact as an intricate sexual sharing goes on, but Catherine, in a Zelda-like way, becomes increasingly vindictive and hostile, especially toward David and his ""work,"" and ends up one day burning the stories (about his father) that he has lately been writing and that he considers the best work he has done. At book's end, Catherine takes the train to Paris to see her lawyers, David and Marita remain behind with their own ""marriage,"" and David embarks on a rewriting of the burned stories (""_________________________________________,"" says David. Marita answers: ""_____ . . . _________________________________________________________""). The part of the novel most fully realized is the tale-within-a-tale, the short story David writes about being, as a boy, with his father on an elephant hunt in Africa. Closer to the present, little is more than superficial, a hyper-atrophied recital of wines, place names, meals, sleepings, swims in the sea, and drinks at the bar, along with repeated remarks about the outward look of things (""_____________________________________________________________________________""), as well as dialogue in the familiar, self-conscious, and excessively stylized late mode that unsatisfactorily takes the place both of characterization and depth: "" '______________________________________________________________________________________. ______________', she said."" Here are symbols and psychosexual innuendos aplenty to keep the gossiping commentators busy. But the vehicle that conveys them is a novel strained, self. parodic, unfinished, sadly dull, and unable to penetrate to the substance beneath its own paralyzingly mannered surface. All in all, it seems less homage than a busy voyeurism to rake these last feeble ashes out of the real greatness that once was. (Editor's Note: Because the publisher has prohibited the use of any quoted material from the Hemingway text before May 20th, we print our review in the somewhat unusual form that you see it here.) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
This long-awaited, posthumously published novel by Ernest Hemingway was written intermittently between 1946 and the author's death in 1961. The massive, unfinished manuscript was considered unpublishable for many years; but in this heavily and judiciously cut version, it is highly readable, and ultimately quite engaging. Based loosely on certain autobiographical aspects of Hemingway's young manhood and his first two marriages, the book is quite outspoken for its time, regarding androgyny and lesbianism. If one ignores the frequent detailed descriptions of meals and drinks, the Hemingway self-parody fades into the background of a compelling story of a menage a trois, comprising the young, Hemingwayesque writer David Bourne, his wife, and their mutual mistress. Though tiresome and frustrating at times, the novel frequently shows flashes of the great writer's best work. It will be required reading for scholars and serious students of Hemingway, and it will be interesting to any general reader. It is nice to read Hemingway again and not know what is going to happen next. Recommended for university, college, community college, and public libraries.-B.H. Leeds, Central Connecticut State University
Library Journal Review
A few shards survive in the sandy ruins of Hemingway's garden of Eden: the pastoral and sensual delights of loving and swimming in Provence and Spain; the pleasure the hero, a novelist, feels when he writes ``truly'' about his father and hunting in Africa. The rest is madness, cruelty, and corruption. Unfortunately, neither the joy nor the terror profoundly engages the reader. The bisexual grotesqueries that bind David Bourne, his antic wife, and their complaisant woman lover are for the most part silly or banal, not even sufficiently bizarre to shock. What we have here is juiceless gossip. As fiction, the book utterly failsclumsily plotted, thematically vague and indecisive, the characters unfleshed caricatures. Even Hemingway's lyrical eloquence is stripped to frayed cliches. How then to justify publishing an edited version of a manuscript Hemingway labored over unsuccessfully for 15 years? Arthur Waldhorn, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.