Word: edenic
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Whoever said dead men tell no tales did not account for Ernest Hemingway. Since he was buried in 1961, ten books have been published with his name on them. They include memoirs, letters, sketches and two novels, Islands in the Stream and now The Garden of Eden, a kinky love triangle about a promising young writer and two women on the leading edge of fashion and sexual mechanics. The setting is the coast of southern France during the mid-1920s. The sun is strong, the water clean, the food good and true. Best of all, the hotel Grau...
There is art in The Garden of Eden; there is also evidence of many artifacts. Hemingway began the book after World War II. In 1947 he wrote the critic Maxwell Geismar, "Getting very big but I cut the hell out of it periodically." Just how big became the concern of Scribners Editor Tom Jenks, 35, who got the job of salvaging a 247-page novel out of 1,500 pages of manuscript. "Editing Hemingway was like wrestling with a god," says the amiable Virginian. What Jenks does not say is that the rules of the game require that...
...result is a lean, sensuous narrative that suggests the existence of a place where affluent, middle-aged manuscripts can go for a rigorous diet and plastic surgery. The surface of The Garden of Eden is taut, chic and strangely contemporary. Newly married David and Catherine have pioneered their own Club Med on the Riviera. It is the perfect place for a sea change. The couple spend golden days brunching, mixing drinks with Perrier, wearing fisherman shirts and espadrilles, swimming and tanning in the buff. The rate of exchange is very favorable...
...more than two dimensions. The first is what Edmund Wilson called "the all- too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream." The second hinges on the age-old view of woman as the cause of original sin. Catherine is a spoiler whose taste in forbidden fruit threatens the private Eden of David's art. It is the place where he struggles with his own lost innocence...
Despite some tender pillow talk and David's willingness to follow Catherine to the hairdresser, The Garden of Eden is not the work of a secret quiche eater. Catherine's urges do not come naturally to David. His women are part of the external world, like the baking Mediterranean sun and the bracing sea. As always in Hemingway, those externals are observed with a meticulous objectivity that conveys loneliness. There are also many self-conscious passages on the writer's solitary struggle. For example: "It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better...