Product Description

HEMINGWAY'S POIGNANT TALE OF A LOVE FOUND TOO LATE

Set in Venice at the close of World War II, Across the River and into the Trees is the bittersweet story of a middle-aged American colonel, scarred by war and in failing health, who finds love with a young Italian countess at the very moment when his life is becoming a physical hardship to him. It is a love so overpowering and spontaneous that it revitalizes the man's spirit and encourages him to dream of a future, even though he knows that there can be no hope for long. Spanning a matter of hours, Across the River and into the Trees is tender and moving, yet tragic in the inexorable shadow of what must come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70248 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780684825533
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. As part of the expatriate community in 1920s Paris, the former journalist and World War I ambulance driver began a career that led to international fame. Hemingway was an aficionado of bullfighting and big-game hunting, and his main protagonists were always men and women of courage and conviction who suffered unseen scars, both physical and emotional.  He covered the Spanish Civil War, portraying it in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he also covered World War II.  His classic novella The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He died in 1961.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.

Four of the boats went on up the main canal toward the big lagoon to the north. A fifth boat had already turned off into a side canal. Now, the sixth boat turned south into a shallow lagoon, and there was no broken water.

It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boatman's oar. Then it would break as sharply as a pane of glass, but the boat made little forward progress.

"Give me an oar," the shooter in the sixth boat said. He stood up and braced himself carefully. He could hear the ducks passing in the darkness, and feel the restless lurching of the dog. To the north he heard the sound of breaking ice from the other boats.

"Be careful," the poler in the stern said. "Don't tip the boat over."

"I am a boatman, too," the shooter said.

He took the long oar the boatman handed him and reversed it so he could hold it by the blade. Holding the blade he reached forward and punched the handle through the ice. He felt the firm bottom of the shallow lagoon, put his weight on the top of the wide oar-blade, and holding with both hands and, first pulling, then shoving, until the pole-hold was well to the stern, he drove the boat ahead to break the ice. The ice broke like sheets of plate glass as the boat drove into it, and onto it, and astern the boatman shoved them ahead into the broken passage.

After a while, the shooter, who was working hard and steadily and sweating in his heavy clothes, asked the boatman, "Where is the shooting barrel?"

"Off there to the left. In the middle of the next bay."

"Should I turn for it now?"

"As you wish."

"What do you mean, as I wish? You know the water. Is there water to carry us there?"

"The tide is low. Who knows?"

"It will be daylight before we get there if we don't hurry."

The boatman did not answer.

All right, you surly jerk, the shooter thought to himself. We are going to get there. We've made two-thirds of the way now and if you are worried about having to work to break ice to pick up birds, that is altogether too bad.

"Get your back in it, jerk," he said in English.

"What?" the boatman asked in Italian.

"I said let's go. It's going to be light."

It was daylight before they reached the oaken staved hogshead sunk in the bottom of the lagoon. It was surrounded by a sloping rim of earth that had been planted with sedge and grass, and the shooter swung carefully up onto this, feeling the frozen grasses break as he stepped on them. The boatman lifted the combination shooting stool and shell box out of the boat and handed it to the shooter, who leaned over and placed it in the bottom of the big barrel.

The shooter, wearing his hip boots and an old combat jacket, with a patch on the left shoulder that no one understood, and with the slight light places on the straps, where stars had been removed, climbed down into the barrel and the boatman handed him his two guns.

He placed them against the wall of the barrel and hung his other shell bag between them, hanging it on two hooks built into the wall of the sunken barrel. Then he leaned the guns against each side of the shell bag.

"Is there water?" he asked the boatman.

"No water," the boatman said.

"Can you drink the lagoon water?"

"No. It is unhealthy."

The shooter was thirsty from the hard work of breaking the ice and driving the boat in and he felt his anger rise, and then held it, and said, "Can I help you in the boat to break ice to put out the decoys?"

"No," the boatman said and shoved the boat savagely out onto the thin sheet ice that cracked and ripped as the boat drove up onto it. The boatman commenced smashing at the ice with the blade of his oar and then started tossing decoys out to the side and behind him.

He's in a beautiful mood, the shooter thought. He's a big brute, too. I worked like a horse coming out here. He just pulled his weight and that's all. What the hell is eating him? This is his trade isn't it?

He arranged the shooting stool so he would have the maximum swing to left and right, opened a box of shells, and filled his pockets and opened another of the boxes of shells in the shell bag so he could reach into it easily. In front of him, where the lagoon lay glazed in the first light, was the black boat and the tall, heavily built boatman smashing with his oar at the ice and tossing decoys overboard as though he were ridding himself of something obscene.

It was getting lighter now and the shooter could see the low line of the near point across the lagoon. Beyond that point he knew there were two other shooting posts and far beyond it there was more marsh and then the open sea. He loaded both his guns and checked the position of the boat that was putting out decoys.

From behind him, he heard the incoming whisper of wings and he crouched, took hold of his right hand gun with his right hand as he looked up from under the rim of the barrel, then stood to shoot at the two ducks that were dropping down, their wings set to brake, coming down dark in the gray dim sky, slanting toward the decoys.

His head low, he swung the gun on a long slant, down, well and ahead of the second duck, then without looking at the result of his shot he raised the gun smoothly, up, up ahead and to the left of the other duck that was climbing to the left and as he pulled, saw it fold in flight and drop among the decoys in the broken ice. He looked to his right and saw the first duck a black patch on the same ice. He knew he had shot carefully on the first duck, far to the right of where the boat was, and on the second, high out and to the left, letting the duck climb far up and to the left to be sure the boat was out of any line of fire. It was a lovely double, shot exactly as he should have shot, with complete consideration and respect for the position of the boat, and he felt very good as he reloaded.

"Listen," the man in the boat called. "Don't shoot toward the boat."

I'll be a sad son of a bitch, the shooter said to himself. I will indeed.

"Get your decoys out," he called to the man in the boat. "But get them out fast. I won't shoot until they are all out. Except straight overhead."

The man in the boat said nothing that could be heard.

I can't figure it, the shooter thought to himself. He knows the game. He knows I split the work, or more, coming out. I never shot a safer or more careful duck in my life than that. What's the matter with him? I offered to put the dekes out with him. The hell with him.

Out on the right now, the boatman was still chopping angrily at the ice, and tossing out the wooden decoys in a hatred that showed in every move he made.

Don't let him spoil it, the shooter told himself. There won't be much shooting with this ice unless the sun should melt it later on. You probably will only have a few birds, so don't let him spoil it for you. You don't know how many more times you will shoot ducks and do not let anything spoil it for you.

He watched the sky lightening beyond the long point of marsh, and turning in the sunken barrel, he looked out across the frozen lagoon, and the marsh, and saw the snow-covered mountains a long way off. Low as he was, no foothills showed, and the mountains rose abruptly from the plain. As he looked toward the mountains he could feel a breeze on his face and he knew, then, the wind would come from there, rising with the sun, and that some birds would surely come flying in from the sea when the wind disturbed them.

The boatman had finished putting out the decoys. They were in two bunches, one straight ahead and to the left toward where the sun would rise, and the other to the shooter's right. Now he dropped over the hen mallard with her string and anchor, and the calling duck bobbed her head under water, and raising and dipping her head, splashed water onto her back.

"Don't you think it would be good to break more ice around the edges?" the shooter called to the boatman. "There's not much water to attract them."

The boatman said nothing but commenced to smash at the jagged perimeter of ice with his oar. This ice breaking was unnecessary and the boatman knew it. But the shooter did not know it and he thought, I do not understand him but I must not let him ruin it. I must keep it entire and not let him do it. Every time you shoot now can be the last shoot and no stupid son of a bitch should be allowed to ruin it. Keep your temper, boy, he told himself.

Copyright © 1950 by Ernest Hemmingway
Copyright renewed © 1978 by Mary Hemmingway

From AudioFile
In classic Hemingway style, a middle-aged American colonel stationed in Europe spends a great deal of time philosophizing about the meaning of war and agonizing over the unspecified physical impairments that prevent him from having a sex life with his teenaged paramour. Boyd Gaines captures the novel's poignancy and brings some life to the endless narrative passages. He imparts an indeterminate European accent to the young Italian countess while giving her a sense of maturity beyond her limited years. While not one of Hemingway's best, this work shows his passion for description and his attraction to impossible romantic situations. Gaines conveys it all in the same tone one imagines the author heard while writing it. R.L.L. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Hemingway's and 20th century's most underrated novel
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.

Strange at first, but very good nonetheless.
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.

Moving
Almost all of Hemingway's tales include the loss of love, hope, and/or life. His novels are very well written but can be depressing. This novel was written in his later years and I think the hard-lived colonel it details is a depiction of Hemingway himself. He must have felt that his life was soon over and he learned to love at all the wrong times. The book was excellent however and did a worthy job of capturing average simple conversions in a colloquial type of manner.