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4.0 out of 5 stars
Mediterranean menage a trois, Feb 9 2004
In this posthumous Hemingway novel, David Bourne, a talented young author who has just published his second novel to much acclaim, is on an extended honeymoon with his bride Catherine traveling throughout various hot spots on the Mediterranean. They're American, of course, and to Hemingway the best way to be American is to spend as much time as possible in Europe. As the title implies, the setting of David and Catherine's romantic idyll is nothing short of paradise, a splendor of leisure, food, and drink -- and there is indeed a lot of drinking.One day Catherine returns to the hotel where she and David are staying with her hair cut short as a boy's; this simple but suggestive act precipitates a flurry of homoerotic innuendoes that pervade the remainder of the novel. At Cannes they meet a beautiful European girl named Marita who is attracted -- sexually -- to both of them, as they are to her. She becomes their traveling companion and, with everybody's consent, makes love to Catherine and then to David, but not, I'm afraid, at the same time. If this menage a trois is supposed to represent the Fall, with Marita playing the role of the Serpent, it seems that Paradise is not yet lost. As a writer, David (like his creator) lets his life become his work, and he is currently inspired to write a story about elephant hunting with his father in Africa, a reminiscence of a transformative boyhood event. Catherine, an idle and apparently rich girl with no professional aspirations of her own except to char herself to a crisp getting the darkest tan she can, is jealous of his work and the authorial attention he gets; Marita, also rich (Catherine frequently calls her Heiress), is more sympathetic to David's intense artistic nature. He is clearly too narcissistic to be in love with anybody but himself and his own work, and being married to him means having to accept that, which may be too much of a sacrifice for Catherine to make. Hemingway's trademark is that he makes his characters so complex precisely by having them say so little. The dialogue here is laconic and breezy, as though verbosity would be tedious in a place of such beauty and with people so blithe and lax. The easy, free flow of the narrative, giving the impression of having been written on autopilot, belies the fact that Hemingway spent the last fifteen years of his life working on this novel sporadically, evidently putting a tremendous amount of consideration into the statement he wanted to make. Like most of his statements, it bears his unmistakable stamp of restlessness and of impatience with the normal course of the world.
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by Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
