A line-by-line examination of a neglected Hemingway gem In 1950,
Ernest Hemingway was the most famous writer in the world, and he
faced intense expectations for a masterwork to follow up his epic
For Whom the Bell Tolls, published a decade earlier. The novel that
emerged, Across the River and into the Trees, was a chronicle of
the final days of the cantankerous American colonel Richard
Cantwell, who spends his weekend leave in Venice hunting ducks,
enjoying the city, and spending time with his beloved teenaged
Italian contessa, Renata. This work elicited everything from
full-throated praise to howls of derision and outrage. Sixty-five
years later, it has been consigned to the margins of Hemingway's
legendary career. Through this exhaustive reading of Across the
River and into the Trees, Mark Cirino shows that we cannot
disparage what we do not understand. With this novel, Hemingway is
at his most allusive and opaque, and Cirino unpacks Hemingway's
vaunted iceberg theory, in which the majority of a text's substance
remains submerged, unspoken, and invisible. Hemingway makes
constant references to his own life, friends, and families; other
artistic works; the history, politics, and culture of Venice and
America; and he draws from his more celebrated works of fiction.
Cirino traces the complex web that left many of the novel's readers
confused. In Across the River and into the Trees, the classic
Hemingway themes emerge: the soldier after the war and the function
of love amid the bloody twentieth century. We learn about the
conflicting roles of the soldier and the artist in society and the
way a man can struggle to be human and humane to those around him.
Reading Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees is the
premier work devoted to the novel. Although Hemingway's book has
been relegated to the corners of twentieth-century literature,
Cirino's exegesis offers a new perspective on the work, at once
reintroducing the novel to aficionados, introducing it to new
readers, and deepening our understanding of Hemingway's more famous
works.
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