The Garden of Eden

The Book

How did I come about this book? Jason showed it to me when I was hanging out at the hammock in the hideout. It was a lazy Sunday. And there was this old book. It was donated by the National Book Development Board from the United States- and they have the pleasure of donating an old copy of a Hemingway, while us mortals exhaust all means to get our hands on one for whatever personal purposes there are. All of the Hemingways I have read are borrowed from the university library.

Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden is a good one. And his genius shines through.

The dust jacket has many holes, but it is hardbound in cloth and the binding is excellent. It was published in 1981, a few years before I was born- so this copy is older than I am. And yet, it is still alive. This is the beauty of hardbound books. The pages can be felt-touched. They are still crisp but yellowed. Aged. But the book is always worth reading.

The borrowed book, quite a treasure regardless of its age and condition

The Style

How do I begin to describe Ernest Hemingway's style?

He is sensual. He knows how to describe in such a simple manner what goes on between two people, in their private moments together. He writes about the weight, the scales of a fresh fish, the taste of the wine, the sea. The life that is unwired.

The dialogue is short and simple. It's in the narration Hemingway gets back at. He does not believe in commas. And I would like to think that whatever rare commas are inserted in the dialogue is for the sake of clarification- and augmentation. The book was published years after his death, one of the unfinished manuscripts, and some parts were edited to make it in time for the release. Apart from all that, Hemingway is intriguing.

I shall pressure myself to understand more about his style.

The Setting

I've never been good with memorizing names which may sound French or Spanish. But I do get the feel of the location as how he describes it and its people. It is quaint provincial life. Simple living, and the simple pleasures of food and wine, lazy seaside life-lying awake at night and falling asleep when the day is about to start, this is the kind of routine Hemingway describes for a couple on their honeymoon. 


The Author

Ernest Hemingway, one of the beloved authors of English literature of all time 

How do you describe one of the literary geniuses of our time whose works are all literary treasures? He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Type in the name in any research engine, the answer will be there.

Other titles by Ernest Hemingway

• The Old Man and the Sea
• For Whom the Bells Toll
• A Moveable Feast
• The Sun Also Rises
• A Farewell to Arms
• In Our Time
• Islands in the Stream