Across the River and Into the Trees [Paperback]

Ernest Hemingway (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons (1978)
• ASIN: B000L9CUSK
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 3.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,859,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ernest Hemingway ranks as the most famous of twentieth-century American writers; like Mark Twain, Hemingway is one of those rare authors most people know about, whether they have read him or not. The difference is that Twain, with his white suit, ubiquitous cigar, and easy wit, survives in the public imagination as a basically, lovable figure, while the deeply imprinted image of Hemingway as rugged and macho has been much less universally admired, for all his fame. Hemingway has been regarded less as a writer dedicated to his craft than as a man of action who happened to be afflicted with genius. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes rather than Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hemingway did in fact address all those subjects in his books, and he acquired his expertise through well-reported acts of participation as well as of observation; by going to all the wars of his time, hunting and fishing for great beasts, marrying four times, occasionally getting into fistfights, drinking too much, and becoming, in the end, a worldwide celebrity recognizable for his signature beard and challenging physical pursuits.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hemingway's and 20th century's most underrated novel, July 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Across The River And Into The Trees (Paperback)

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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Maddening, July 22, 2006

By 

Andrew B. Goodwin (Orlando, Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Across The River And Into The Trees (Paperback)

This novel encapsulates all the frustrations of late Hemingway. It begins well, but lapses rapidly into sollipsism and self-parody. Just when the reader has his arm cocked to hurl it across the room, the novel improves; and just when the reader leans forward, savoring the Hemingway prose and waiting for what happens next, it goes bad again.

Like The Garden of Eden and Islands in the Stream, Across the River and Into the Trees contains wonderful elements that are worthy of the best Hemingway but it is marred by a central flaw: There seems to be no compelling reason for the book to exist other than to update Hemingway's personal mythology.

Hemingway's early work was powered by several powerful elements: the author's willingness to face hard realities unflinchingly and without romanticism; and an ability to frame his characters' situations so that they took on the force of universal metaphors.

Alas, in this novel, flashes of the old brilliance can't overcome the main character's self-absorption and his creator's wishful thinking.

And yet . . . and yet . . . after I finished rereading Across the River and Into the Trees, I went to a bookstore and found that all the books I examined looked slight by comparison.

And the next day I found my emotions were very close to the surface, proof, I think, that Hemingway's power to move his readers and embed archetypal themes in his narratives persisted despite his decay.

Very strange.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strange at first, but very good nonetheless., January 6, 2002

By 

Angry Mofo "angrymofo" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Across the River and into the Trees (Hardcover)

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.