Across the River and Into the Trees

Awful book. Only finished reading it because Hemingway is my favorite author.

I don't know why everyone is apt to be so sure this book is weak or sentimental. It's a difficult subject, what people call a tough ask; Hemingway is trying to describe the last luminous moments of a love that knows itself to be both utterly transcendant and also doomed. I think he succeeds, because the love scenes and their clumsiness and cliches and groped-for words are intespersed with thickly jargon-laden and nearly incomprehensible war recollections and also with perhaps the most radiant descriptions of Venice ever written (yes, better than Mann or Ruskin or James); the one of the Rialto market is especially powerful. This love has a place and a time; it's therefore also about the impossibility of even the purest love fully transcending these. I am tired of eveyrone saying tsk tsk about Renata's age; surely this is simply realistic? Old alpha males do like young girls, and young girls are the only ones gentle and honest and tender enough to bother with alpha males as grumpy and difficult as the colonel. He knows this himself. And at nineteen you don't set limits on your own generosity as you do later. That's lovely to remember, even if you also remember what it turned out to cost you. Renata is not stupid just because she is not feisty or assertive or spunky. I am tired of the conflation of strength with these traits. The literary portrayal of women has become a kind of anxious hymn to restless self-assertion. Can't there also be women with more self-belief? Try this book and see if you think there can; I can guarantee that it's beautiful even if you end up disliking its content.

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.

Exactly what sort of book would one expect from a writer who had just written "For Whom the Bell Tolls"? I don't know either, but probably not this hushed, elegiac novel. It's not the brooding melancholy of "Across the River and Into the Trees" itself that's surprising - it's that the book contains no action and no climax of pretty much any sort, and that it still manages to be so good.Essentially, the book is the restless consciousness of one Richard Cantwell, Colonel in the United States Army, veteran of two world wars, recipient of many grave wounds, who is travelling through Europe one last time to shoot some ducks, meet some old friends, and spend a couple of days with his last, real and only love, a nineteen-year-old (!) countess named Renate. The book is aptly titled - it flows like a quiet old river, slowly but surely and a bit sadly. Like many a Hemingway hero, Cantwell is stuck with an empty existence, a profession he doesn't much care for, and awareness of both of the above. Love Renate though he does, he lives in the past, constantly reliving this and that battle, moving imaginary troops one minute, then wondering about the meaning of it all the next.Renate herself is the least realistic of all Hemingway women, and as a female lead she's poor indeed. That is not, however, the way she should be seen. She is described as having almost unworldly gentleness and purity, an enormous contrast to the colonel (esp. given her youth). In a way, she becomes almost a symbol of the youth the colonel has irrevocably lost, an epitome of everything he missed out on - and the stories of the battles he tells her become almost like religious confessions. In the end, Cantwell ruefully realizes that he cannot tell her everything, that she could not possibly understand all the sorrows he suffered and never was freed from, that he thus cannot be redeemed, and the book ends on a funereal note.Lack of action notwithstanding, the poignant, honest self-analysis and wistful tone make this book beautiful in the same way a stately, quiet funeral dirge is. Cantwell is likely Hemingway's most autobiographical character - indeed, we get further inside his head than we did in Jake Barnes's, or Robert Jordan's, or Harry Morgan's - and probably well reflects Hemingway's own state of mind at the time. In the long mental soliloquys about politics, Europe, war and life in general, the line between author and character disappears. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine an American officer (of such rank) thinking in such terms - no, this is Hemingway himself, writing down his thoughts and feelings and donning a colonel's uniform for the occasion. And if you felt like that, you might well have come to the same conclusion the author did.

Almost all of Hemingway's tales include the loss of love, hope, and/or life. His novels are very well written but can be depressing. This novel was written in his later years and I think the hard-lived colonel it details is a depiction of Hemingway himself. He must have felt that his life was soon over and he learned to love at all the wrong times. The book was excellent however and did a worthy job of capturing average simple conversions in a colloquial type of manner.

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.