Monday, September 15, 2014

A Less Than Heavenly Hemingway

The Garden of EdenThe Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hemingway knows how to draw up a batshit crazy lady...but to be honest, I'm not even sure this is a genuine Ernest Hemingway novel. It might be a forgery. But we'll get to that later.

The Garden of Eden puts a newlywed couple's relationship under the microscope. David and Catherine are honeymooning in the Mediterranean. David is a writer. Catherine is a crazy bitch. David needs a security, time to write and support in his pursuits. Catherine needs occupation. She has too much time on her hands to allow her off-kilter mind to wander where it will, and it wanders down strange, dark and spiteful paths.

The Eden aspect comes in when Catherine can't leave well-enough alone. (David even nicknames her "Devil" least the metaphor should go over your head.) Everything was fine, yet she had to tamper with the creation of man and woman, what that means, who holds what role and then reversing it.

Hemingway has been criticized for his use of repetitious dialogue, but here it works well to create an aura of crazy. Catherine repeats her insane pleas, her cloying begging, her bizarre demands, and it drives you nuts. So, well done! Hemingway has also been criticized for, well, just being boring. He writes about people doing virtually nothing. As they say, write what you know, and after a while Hemingway did nothing but write, lounge about, eat and drink. So that's what he writes about and honestly, I don't need to know what kind of drink you had, because buddy, you drink inconsequentially ALL the time.

The posthumously released The Garden of Eden reads like a repeat. He worked on it about 20 years later, but it feels so very much like The Sun Also Rises that one wonders why Hemingway would write the same novel over again and try to pass it off as something new. Well, maybe he'd run out of ideas.

Where it diverges is in the sheer nakedness with which Hemingway approaches the transgender subject. Sure, he created manly women in the past, but this is flat out ambiguous and explicit sexuality. I find it strange that he should delve into the topic considering he all but abandoned his son Gregory after he came out to him as a transgender person. The idea apparently seemed abhorrent to Ernest, so why would he write an entire novel about it? Well, maybe he'd run out of ideas. Yes, running out of ideas has become a theme here. I think it's a fair criticism. I mean, if nothing else, you know you've been at it too long if you find that yourself as a writer writing a novel about a writer writing a novel.

Gregory had aspirations to be a writer, after a fashion. In the '70s he wrote a generally well-received biography on his dad. Then this book mysteriously appeared in the '80s. Perhaps the Hemingway family estate was running a bit low on funds and thought, hey, why not refill the coffers with a "new" Hemingway novel. Fans would go gaga over a newly unearthed book by Papa.

I'm jumping to conclusions like taking a leap off a cliff, but stranger things have happened. I don't doubt that there was an unfinished Hemingway manuscript laying about (apparently there was more than one), but there are so many things about this one that lead me to believe that in the very least it was tampered with to a great degree. Here are a few of those things:


The aforementioned deep look into a subject Hemingway seemed to be repulsed by.

At one point the character talks about writing "in dad's style." It's like Gregory giving the reader a cheeky wink-wink. And, whoever the writer is, he does it more than once.

Copying Papa's style is not impossible. In fact, reviewers making fun of Hemingway do it all the time here on Goodreads.

The story David is writing deals heavily with "daddy" issues, which - from what I've read - Gregory suffered severely from.

The big game hunter in David's story is Hemingway and the hunter's son sounds just like Gregory.

He says "fuck hunting". Hemingway would never say fuck hunting! :)



Of course all this could be Hemingway just writing about his relationship with his son, so I don't put a great deal of stock into it. Remember, this is just a loose theory.

Regardless of whether this is Ernest Hemingway's book or not, the fact is, this book is not a good read. There are some good points: the character study of a young author and that of a nutter going off the deep end. But this could've been summed up in half the time. This is not a long book, but it's too long for the very little that happens. Boredom set in for this reader at about the midway point.



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