Has anyone read The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway? How was it?
I read it a few years ago.
First, as a disclaimer, my memory is just awful and it’s all I’m basing this on.
It’s a very uncomfortable, and ultimately unsatisfying book. I can’t remember how it ended just now, but I do remember that the ending resolved nothing and left me feeling frustrated. Sure, a lot of Hemingway’s stories (most Hemingway’s stories) haven’t tidy endings. That’s not the problem with this one. I remember thinking that he just didn’t know what to do with his characters and so he decided to end the story as arbitrarily as had been all the events contained in it
It seemed deeply autobiographical: the incident of the suitcase full of stories that his wife lost is central to the story (it is but barely disguised). However, it felt not as if the story was taken from the actual experiences of his life but more as a case history - a narrative of a neurotic’s fears and repressed feelings - there’s lots of sexual paranoia and profound gender issues strung up in sequence making the plot arbitrary and inconsequential. It’s one of the most misogynistic books I’ve ever read and made me question how sane the author was in his later years. It’s clear from any of his books that Hemingway had problems with women; in this one he seemed to fear and hate them. It’s ironic that Dave Sim hated Hemingway so, as from what I understand of his “female void” gibberish and what I took from this novel they were both very much on the same page, at least by this time in Hemingway’s life.
In terms of style there’s not much I can say. I read this in a portuguese translation, so all the nuances were lost (that’s how I also read A Movable Feast and The Sun Also Rises, but not the short-stories). It’s not the self-parody he sometimes produced, but it didn’t strike me as as powerful and clear as he could be at his best.
I’ve never read a biography of Hemingway, nor comments on this book, so all this could be crap. I don’t hate the man’s work, in fact I think he was a great writer; this book, however, was odd and disturbing in a very bad way.