Garden of Eden

and why it's my favorite Hemingway novel.

Yes, it's a posthumous publication and not as widely praised as his other works such as The Sun Also Rises and For Whom The Bell Tolls but it's, I feel, his greatest work.
Garden of Eden was a labor of love for Hemingway, a novel he worked on on-and-off over the last 15 years of his life between other books that were published such as The Old Man and the Sea. Some critics who have read the entire unfinished manuscript at the JFK office were unhappy with the way it was shortened to a third of its original size for the final published version. But I think the Scribners editor did a great job condensing to make it such a beautiful book. That 'one true sentence' Hemingway strove so hard to write has never been so apparent as in this simple prose. Easy to read is hard to write and I'm in awe of Hemingway.

Here is an example of simple but utterly brilliant writing from Garden of Eden:

They were always hungry but they ate very well. They were hungry for breakfast which they ate at the cafe, ordering brioche and cafe au lait and eggs, and the type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement. They were always so hungry for breakfast that the girl often had a headache until the coffee came. But the coffee took the headache away. She took her coffee without sugar and the young man was learning to remember that. On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly and ground pepper over them in the cups. They were big eggs and fresh and the girl's were not cooked quite as long as the young man's. He remembered that easily and he was happy with his which he diced up with the spoon and ate with only the flow of the butter to moisten them and the fresh early morning texture and the bite of the coarsely ground pepper grains and the hot coffee and the chickory-fragrant bowl of cafe au lait.

Posted by De at April 26, 2004 11:38 PM