What do You think about The Garden Of Eden (2015)?
There are numerous book descriptions here at GR. This says what you need to know: "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...."The book was uncompleted and was published posthumously. This is important to note. It does not read as a finished novel, even if it does contain some great lines. It is repetitive. The different threads are not drawn up properly. At the end, the message delivered is confused. It needs to be tightened up. Hemingway usually delivers a strong clear novel without numerous sidetracks, but not here.There is subdued eroticism which is tantalizing in sections, but then this gets sidetracked into the power struggle in a couple's relationship, and on a higher level between men and women in general. The narration by Patrick Wilson is perfectly acceptable.
—Chrissie
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.
—Jason Koivu
I have become increasingly disappointed in reading the posthumous novels of Hemingway: Islands in the Stream, Under Kilimanjaro and now this one. It’s as if the publishers were trying to squeeze every ounce of value from the scraps left behind by this tortured genius who exited the literary scene too early. I am sure Hemingway the perfectionist would have objected to these works being published in the state they were in had he been alive.The Garden of Eden tells the story of a threesome, a newly married couple and a female tourist they pick up in France. David is an emerging author, Catherine is his wife and patron; she is also sexually challenged as she is battling between being a woman and wanting to be a man. Catherine is jealous of David’s success as a writer, in his discipline, and in his masculinity, none of which she possesses. She wants him to chronicle their travels through France and Spain on this trip while he is being drawn towards writing a story about his father and himself hunting a wild elephant in Africa many years ago. There are bedroom scenes where Catherine wants to be the man, and David obliges, but what they do is subjugated to Hemingways’s iceberg theory, where what is said is only the tip of what is happening below – go figure it out. And use plenty of imagination!Enter Marita, a submissive and co-operative companion. Catherine takes Marita as a lover initially, on the premise that “this is one thing I have to do, or live the rest of my life not knowing.” She feels guilt after the act and turns the girl over to David, and when the two of them hit it off, Catherine turns furiously jealous. David initially dislikes having Marita thrown at him but is physically drawn to her and realizes that she has more of his interests at heart; he realizes that Catherine is using them both to realize herself and release her demons.The published part of this manuscript was part of a much larger work, and it shows, for there are many loose ends left to the reader to figure out. The characters themselves are a bunch of fragile, self-indulgent twenty-somethings only concerned with swimming, drinking, eating, taking excursions around the Riviera and into Spain, and sleeping with each other. David writes in the mornings, and seems to be the only one interested in doing some work to keep his growing career on track.The novel is obviously autobiographical, for it covers the period when Hemingway transitioned from his first wife to his second in France, but reading accounts of that affair, the threesome seemed to have been sponsored by Hemingway, not his wife. I wonder if this novel was a way for the famous author to put a new spin on things for the record books and exonerate himself. There are strong parallels between the reality and the fiction, with descriptions of the author’s workroom across the garden, the two way locks in the doors that allowed the lovers access to each other, and the number of books of the author published at the time. Given Hemingway’s style, the sex is implied although the kissing is liberally doled out. You get good primers on martini making, local swimming conditions and the food of the area. The dialogue is rife with trivialities that mask the occasional bursts of anger lurking under the iceberg. The subtext is loaded with seething emotions. And yet, I found that there was not enough to sustain the novel, and the high points were few and far between. When Catherine burns his African story in a fit of anger, David laments the loss of his work, “When it’s right you cannot remember. Every time you read it, it comes as a big surprise,” as if to say that he will never be able to reproduce that story with the same emotional intensity a second time. There is a parallel between that statement and Hemingway’s life; for after such triumphs as For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and his notable short stories, I wonder whether in his later years, saddled with pain and addled by booze, Hemingway realized that he really would never reach the heights of Kilimanjaro again and these soon-to-be posthumous tomes were mere islands in the stream of what was once a great literary continent gifted to him.
—Shane
